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> I'm absolutely baffled that you think the job that requires some of the most thinking, by far, is somehow less cognitively intense than sending emails and making slide decks.

OK, to quote you: WHOAH WHOAH WHOAH WHOAH STOP!

You've made a lot of assumptions.

I'm not saying that coding is not thinking. What I'm saying is this:

There is a difference between:

  (a) thinking about, and deciding upon, what will be done, and 
  (b) the thinking that is required during implementation.

In my experience, coding is at least 50/50 (even for the best developer) in the sense that figuring out how to structure and fix your code {type (b)} used to require very deep thinking. But then the other thinking time was spent on your system design/architecture {type (a)}, and not debugging type errors, etc.

AI has already changed that split. If you have a good test harness and problem definition, you can throw Codex at a really massive task and have it do quite well at the finer details of implementation.

Other white-collar office work, as stupid as it may be, will be a lot harder to automate because it is primarily the "thinking about what will be done" {type (a)} kind of work and not the "thinking that is done during implementation" {type (b)} kind of work.

If you haven't seen what I mean by "enterprise office work" it may be hard to grasp what I'm talking about... But thinking that people are just doodling around making slide decks or writing shitty emails is the wrong mental model for the breadth of non-technical work available in a large company.

[overgard]

I don't like this perspective because you're reducing developers to "mere implementers". That's not something I see in healthy work environments. A lot of times developers have to make business decisions, because they're the first person to encounter holes in the spec and no project manager is going to define things completely.

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I'm sorry you interpreted it that way. I certainly don't think developers are mere implementers, and certainly no one on my team is. I expect a lot of ownership and independent execution from people I work with.

I also don't expect AI to replace software engineers any more than white-collar business people.

But what I'm saying is the work of "mere implementation" is now happening pretty quickly with AI tooling.

Most white-collar work is not "mere implementation" but rather the yak shaving and spec definition that precedes "mere implementation" — and this includes software development. For that reason, it will be harder to fully automate.