because this comment is responding to: "I think the field is basically over as a long term career unless you are truly exceptional. It will become very easy to build most software"

photoshop, paypal, and many more companies etc. have software of vast complexity that cannot be reproduced or maintained today solely with llms, ipso facto you still need software developers or some similar role to build and maintain the complexity of _yesterday_

some guy shipping an iOS app to zero users doesn't change that. although i think it is good we can have more bespoke software.

Why would anyone get rich doing something easy?

Now you can make a prototype without understanding what's going on internally or why the prototype wasn't good enough!

If you believe that I've got a halting problem oracle to sell to you.

Is it really that simple ? A programming function that has set inputs and determinstic outputs is rather verifyable. A ten million lines code base is not easily verifyable. Knowing whether an agent is improving when it's working on a huge codebase is not that easy - it could easily start hurting code quality without it being clear in any output.

I think this is true.

A lot of AI believers (me too fwiw) seem to forget it’s a lot harder to ‘close the loop’ on non-code projects. I think this is because they are usually coders.

> no programming is verifiable, and the major LLM companies are focused on it. its the first domino to fall by probably 5+ years

Which is kinda proof they're populated by sociopaths with extremely little empathy. The people who are building that stuff are programmers, and if they had a tiny bit of functioning empathy they'd stop or slow down or at least be unenthusiastic.

And we're not talking about very high level empathy here, but the very basic kind of thinking about the effects on someone very much like yourself.

they won't even need that as agents talk to their own lanes in some Linear project management workflow that your sales team agents are connected. The entire system is going to end up agentic and even the CEO will be out of work unless they are founders and owners of the company. We'll all have our own business this way. Or it all collapses. Time will tell.

I don't accept that argument. As I see it, laws should be structured as data rather than code, using a clean non-Turing-Complete DSL for any embedded logic and calculations. Maybe there would still be occasional situations when new software features are needed, but it should be a rare occurrence rather than on every new change.

There are really a ton of fields where people have done an absolutely terrible job of properly using the advantages of software, even pre AI. Like, even today there are people manually drawing footprints in PCB design software, manually determining what pins carry differential signals, manually forgetting to swap RX and TX lines.. except for the functions they absolutely had to have a computer do, they forgot to move out all the drudgery and footguns and continue operating in "PDF space". It's embarrassing for a profession that is supposedly made of engineers.

PDF space is still more advanced than the people typing into "word processors" however. Making software to emulate letters was such a massive mistake for the trajectory of computing, it let people effortlessly "adopt computers" by making a digital facsimile of their terrible analog processes. Only with AI we now have the ability to digest all this unstructured mess.

If the work to be done is infinite, why would there necessarily be fewer people doing it?

> In a few years, it just might.

If you're in a product company and your development backlog is empty, run. That company is about to go out of business.

Just another 6 months bro, only another funding bro, I promise, all devs will be replaced bro

I have stupid question here. Why they sell tokens instead of AI generated full application and AI fixes to your code without you needing a single dev?