people seem to have a inability to predict second and third order effects
the first order effect is "I can sip a latte while the bot does my job for me"... well, great I suppose, while it lasts
but the second order effect is: unless you're in the top 10%, you will now lose your job, permanently
and the third order effect is the economy collapses as it is built on consumer spending
But it's also likely that these tools will produce mountains of unmaintainable code and people will get buried by the technical debt. It kind of strikes me as similar to the hubris of calling the Titanic "unsinkable." It's an untested claim with potentially disastrous consequences.
It's not just likely, but it's guaranteed to happen if you're not keeping an eye on it. So much so, that it's really reinforced my existing prejudice towards typed and compiled languages to reduce some of the checking you need to do.
Using an agent with a dynamic language feels very YOLO to me. I guess you can somewhat compensate with reams of tests though. (which begs the question, is the dynamic language still saving you time?)
Meanwhile they are hollowing out work forces based on those metrics.
If we make doing the right thing career limiting this all gets rather messy rather quickly.
But it is sad if good programmers should loose sight of the opportunities the future will bring (future as in the next few decades). If anything, software expertise is likely to be one of the most sought-after skills - only a slightly different kind of skill than churning out LOCs on a keyboard faster than the next person: People who can harness the LLMs, design prompts at the right abstraction level, verify the code produced, understand when someone has injected malware, etc. These skills will be extremely valuable in the short to medium term AFAICS.
But ultimately we will obviously become obsolete if nothing (really) catastrophic happens, but when that happens then likely all human labor will be obsolete too, and society will need to be organized differently than exchanging labor for money for means of sustenance.
Any implementation moat around rapid prototyping, and any fundraising moat around hiring a team of 10 to knock out your first few versions, seems gone now. Trying to sell MVP-tier software is real hard when a bunch of your potential customers will just think "thanks for the idea, I'll just make my own."
The crunch for engineers, on the other hand, seems like that even if engineers are needed to "orchestrate the agents" and manage everything, there could be a feature-velocity barrier for the software that you can still sell (either internally or externally). Changing stuff more rapidly can quickly hit a point of limited ROI if users can't adjust, or are slowed by constant tooling/workflow churn. So at some point (for the first time in many engineers' career, probably) you'll probably see product say "ok even though we built everything we want to test, we can't roll it all out at once!". But maybe what is learned from starting to roll those things out will necessitate more changes continually that will need some level of staffing still. Or maybe cheaper code just means ever-more-specialized workflows instead of pushing users to one-size-fits-all tooling.
In both of those cases the biggest challenge seems to be "how do you keep it from toppling down over time" which has been the biggest unsolved problem in consumer software development for decades. There's a prominent crowd right now saying "the agents will just manage it by continuing to hack on everything new until all the old stuff is stable too" but I'm not sure that's entirely realistic. Maybe the valuable engineering skills will be putting in the right guardrails to make sure that behavioral verification of the code is a tractable problem. Or maybe the agents will do that too. But right now, like you say, I haven't found particularly good results in conceptualizing better solutions from the current tools.
I think we realistically have a few years of runway left though. Adoption is always slow outside of the far right of the bell curve.
Frankly, I am not sure there is a place in the world at all for me in ten years.
I think the future might just be a big enough garden to keep me fed while I wait for lack of healthcare access to put me out of my misery.
I am glad I am not younger.