zlacker

Following this logic, why not move further left?

Become a CTO, CEO or even a venture investor. "Here's $100K worth tokens, analyze market, review various proposals from Agents, invest tokens, maximize profit".

You know why not? Because it will be more obvious it doesn't work as advertised.

>>oxag3n+(OP)
You have to move up or down to survive. In 10 years we'll either be managers (either of humans or agents), or we'll be electrical engineers. Programming is done! I for one am glad.

>>ipnon+g2
There are two extremes and spectrum in between:

* AI can replace knowledge workers - most of existing software engineers, managers of all levels will loose their job and have to re-qualify.

* AI requires human in the loop.

In the first scenario, I see no reason to waste time and should start building plan B now (remaining job markets will be saturated at that point).

In the second scenario, tech-debt and zettabytes of slop will harm companies which relied on it heavily. In the age of failing giants and crumbling infrastructure, engineers and startups that can replace gigawatt burning data center with a few kilowatt rack, by manually coding a shell script that replaces Hadoop, will flourish.

Most probably it will be a spectrum - some roles can be replaced, some not.

>>oxag3n+(OP)
If one truly believed in LLMs being able to replace knowledge workers, then it would also hold that they could replace managers and execs. In fact, they should be able to do it even better: LLMs could convert every company into a "flat" one, bypassing the manangement hierarchy and directly consuming meeting notes from every meeting to get the real status as the source of truth, and provide suggestions as needed. If combined with web-search capability, they would also be more plugged into the market, customer sentiment, and competitors than most execs could ever be.

>>kracke+Yu
We're not at the point where we are replacing all software developers entirely (and will never be without real AGI), but we are definitely at the point where scaling back headcount is possible.

Also, creating software is much more testable and verifiable than what a CEO does. You can usually tell when the code isn't right because it doesn't work or doesn't pass a test. How can you verify that your AI CEO is giving you the right information or planning its business strategy effectively?

It's one of the biggest reasons that software development and art are the two domains in which AI excels. In software you can know when it's right, and in art it doesn't matter if it's right.