I think that it's very odd how AI enthusiasts misinterpret the situation. If it turns out to be good enough to produce greenfield projects with agentic coding, then it will not only affect developers, but also whole companies and whole business sectors.
The whole dev agency business model is only there because less technical companies don't know how to deal with software, others are just opportunistic to outsource the initial, headcount heavy work. But now the tech is already at the fingertips of an agencies customer, it is only a matter of time those CEO and managers start vibe coding and realize the "only" need one dev that has glimpse of tech skill.
This could also extend to many SaaS businesses. I still see a lot of small businesses that ask for custom software to get rid of manual work. Serious software devs were always too expensive for them. So they either have crappy code from someones nephew or a SaaS that barely works. Now they can create their custom solutions, probably still quite crappy, but they can get more out of it.
What big tech does is kind of whatever, they are readjusting for recession. I am a bit concerned about the disruption in the small to mid sized tech sectors.
We are only getting started, this trend is not going to revert, we are going to get cheaper tokens and more Fable 5 exceeding models that are going to be faster and easier to use.
We had a recession before personal computing took off and another one after the dot com bubble, this didn't put any hinderance on adaoption of the new tech it increased it
almost all businesses do not care about your opinion of codebase or quality. they just want it to work and not fail.
on top of that the token costs are dropping as AI giants fight over marketshare.
"You don't really need to work for a company anymore, because a solo dev can absolutely build crazy things, so it's not like you need to rely on anyone else."
One of the reasons for devs to work in company is not that they can't deliver the work themselves. It's that they don't have the connections to land customers. Most devs need a company at least to handle the marketing so they can focus on what they are good at.
Being a sole-proprietorship means doing things you aren't skilled in and, most likely, not interested in doing. When I did it, I had a horrid work-life balance and I would not recommend it.
Don't conflate what is theoretically vs. realistically possible. In the real world, successful companies have moats from data, patents/IP, network effects, and so forth. Just because you can develop something in 1/100th the time doesn't make it instantly feasible to build a new business around. Look around the tech industry today.. plenty of companies that could be disrupted by spry AI-powered buidlers, but they are not (owing to these lock-in effects).