> A machine is coming along that genuinely might be 80% of your skill set in a few years

Something similar happened when COBOL came out. Same with website builders. The big difference between most industries versus software is we aren't even close to satisfying the world's desire for software yet, so increases in productivity just gives us bigger leverage.

From a greybeard, I'll say this: This is nothing new. I don't see that this will disadvantage anybody other than those with a failure to adapt. This is about on par with IDEs that can stub out tests and method signatures on the scale of things to worry about.

> A machine is coming along that genuinely might be 80% of your skill set in a few years

Is this supposed to be scary? This scenario is absolute stonks if you're a developer worth your salt. A machine makes me 5 times more productive, and I don't even have to commoditize my complement because they're taking care of that themselves?

This assumes companies have finite backlogs. AI will raise productivity, but to date no company has said 'our software is done, send all the programmers home.' Instead companies expand what they want from their software.

The rate of change could make the short term bumpy as companies try to play around with less dev work. Eventually though competition will push companies to raise their productivity to the new baseline (programmers + AI).

One thing that is a danger is if devs ignore what's happening in AI. I remember when Google first came out having to learn the art of querying Google to get what I was looking for. AI/LLMs looks to be the same - ignore learning how to leverage them at your own peril.

I think we're misidentifying AI as the catalyst when it's more like the accepted excuse for diminishing compensation for software developers. Ownership wanted to drive down costs as salaries were getting out of control. This includes not just wages but work/life balance and other perks.

Personally I think its cyclical as software is such a key component of communication and automation - and so we'll see future growth periods but probably not to the same extent as the last decade where seemingly every undergrad was compelled to study Computer Science.

I don’t think that software salaries are coming down yet as a result of Copilot/ChatGPT, they’ve come down because of overexpansion during COVID and a big rise in interest rates that makes raising funding and investment much more challenging for most technology companies and forces them to become profitable sooner rather than later (with some not able to make that transition and therefore failing).

Junior positions being hard to find are the result of the post Covid market correction and the relative expense of borrowing money in a high interest rate environment, not of chatbots replacing juniors. Executives might be saying it's AI but they're wrong.

(nodding my head in glum agreement to this comment)