[mawadev]

I mean it's pretty simple: management will take bad quality (because they don't understand the field) over having and paying more employees any day. Software engineer positions will shrink and be unrecognizable: one person expected to be doing the work of multiple departments to stay employed. People may leave the field or won't bother learning it. When the critical mass is reached, AI will be paywalled and rug pulled. Then the field evens itself out again over a long, expensive period of time for every company that fell for it, lowering the expectations back to reality.

[Anamon]

That's another one for concluding that there's nothing new under the sun. This is the exact dynamic that happened during the offshoring hype.

Now, it's expecting senior engineers to "orchestrate" 10 coding agents, then it was expecting them to orchestrate 10 cheap developers on the other side of the world. Then, the reckoning came when those offshore developers realised that if they produced code as good as that of a "1st world" engineer, they can ask a similar salary, too, and those offshoring clients who didn't want to pay up were left with those contractors who weren't good enough to do that. This time, it will be agent pricing approaching the true costs. Both times, the breaking point is when managers realise that writing code was never the bottleneck in the first place.

[falloutx]

This is truly the problem: You either get fired or you get to work 10x more to survive. Only question is how many of us will be in 1st group and how many in the 2nd group, its a lose lose situation.

[mawadev]

Exactly. Some jobs moved from database, backend, frontend and devops to "fullstack", which means 4 jobs with the pay of one. People do that job, but with only 8h-10h in a day the quality is as expected. I think overall people will try to move out of the field, no matter how much of a force multiplier AI might be. Its simply a worse trade to carry so much responsibility and burden when you can work in IT or outside of IT in a less cognitively demanding field with set hours and expectations for the same pay (in EU, very hyperbolic statement tbh). Especially when the profit you bring dwarfs the compensation with all the frustrations that come with knowing that and being kept down in the corporate ladder.