Which is exactly the right amount.

Honestly, I hope the AI companies implode as well - and am fairly sure they will; OpenAI’s entire business model is that they will be AI gatekeepers and everyone will have to pay them for access - but even now, the only way they can make this true is by artificially inflating the cost of inference hardware. That’s simply not sustainable - cheap inference accelerators will come from China (ok, maybe somewhere else but at the moment US industrial policy is doing its best to make it China) and then it’s game over for that business plan.

But while that makes OpenAI et al a shitty investment prospect, it won’t stop AI taking your job if you don’t adapt. You would be amazed at the capability of models that you can run locally right now. All the major providers can go out of business tomorrow, and the guy who is running Qwen locally will still be twice as effective a developer as you are.

The genie is absolutely out of the bottle and not going back in. The choice is to either find a new profession (which is totally valid, of course,) or start learning now how to be one of the people who survives by learning to use the tools better than anyone else. LLMs are dumb as a box of rocks, they are always going to need an actual intelligence to understand how to actually use them to accomplish any non-trivial useful thing. The people who get that and learn that will be the ones who still have a job when all this washes out.

(The “herp derp no they’ll replace you too the only thing to do is wail and protest” contingent are inhabiting a weird space where they believe that LLMs are (a) useless but also (b) actually super intelligent and will replace us. Both these things cannot be true… Reality is they’re very dumb, but still very useful. These things absolutely can be true; my compiler has zero intelligence, but it’s still extremely useful and I’m glad I don’t hand write assembler any more…)

He may be dead right, and unduly pessimistic at the same time.

The industry massively overhired relatively unskilled people who believed the job was “writing code”, for a few decades; those people got by thanks to Stack Overflow and the fact that most of the code that needed writing really didn’t need much skill anyway. There’s very little innovation or engineering in most business platforms - a couple of decent architects and an army of code monkeys can deliver most of the software that’s needed. We also developed programming languages and frameworks that made it much easier for the unskilled developers to be productive.

Sad to say, these are the people now loudly wailing about the iniquities of AI. If you thought churning out code was the profession - you absolutely should be very concerned that AI will replace you - it will. But if you realised that code was only ever a side effect of the job, which was applying computing to solve problems - you have little to worry about. AI is just a new tool to do it, and is no more a threat than optimising compilers, mamaged runtimes or IDEs were.

When I started my career, I wrote assembly code by hand for platforms that barely even had an operating system. Then C. Then Java - and as far as I’m concerned, every programming language since then has pretty much had training wheels permanently attached… For the last few years, I’ve preferred Rust, although the job has been more about developing architectures for others to implement than coding myself. But my expectation is that I’ll end my career writing instructions for AIs to implement; and that’s absolutely fine. The job didn’t change, just some of the intermediate representations I had to write to do it. The profession will probably go back to look more like the one I entered - fewer people doing it, but with more formal education in computer science, and much less “coding”.

Which is not to say I don’t think there’s anything to worry about for the profession, there absolutely is. How the hell we identify the future senior engineers with the actual skill and aptitude required, when there are no junior roles to provide the necessary apprenticeship - and when the education system is struggling to adapt to AI use in class - is a massive and fundamental problem. That’s what keeps me awake at night, not people who think writing CRUD APIs in C# is a divine gift.

Republicans.

LibreOffice still hasn’t managed to sort out making the UI scalable on Wayland, so you’re stuck with either needing a magnifying glass to see the icons or you have to stand in the next room over and nothing in between. Given how many years they’ve had to work on that, I feel like the odds of them developing a working web UI in my lifetime are pretty slim.