Stories like these are hard to square with studies that show zero or negative productivity improvements with AI.
I wonder what's going to happen when the AI companies stop essentially giving away their product, and start trying to make money. Does the whole ridiculous circus just stop dead?
There is a lot of back and forth between "it will take all jobs," and "it shows zero or negative productivity gains." The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, with the tiebreaker being that these tools are getting better at breathtaking speeds. So even if capabilities aren't all-encompassing now, they are increasingly so.
As a Gen-Z who has first-hand experience with the situations described in the article, I am worried.
This kind of thing certainly upset me and caused a lot of anxiety the first couple of times I experienced it, but as it's happened over and over again through the course of my career, I've learned to shrug it off. Some new thing comes along, people make lots of money working on it, then it becomes well-enough understood to automate, and all those jobs disappear.
It does suck, when you enjoyed doing whatever that thing was, to watch the robots take it over.
The thing of it is that Jevons' paradox applies to software development as much as it does to anything else. When it becomes easier (and therefore cheaper) to make software, people demand more of it. This creates new demand for human engineers to work on whichever parts of the problem are not yet well understood enough to be automated.
A software engineering career never stays put for too long, especially the closer you are to the applications end of things. You might get to ride a groove for as long as a decade, if you're lucky, but change will always come. It doesn't mean your career is over.
I agree that more people need to stay aware that we're in the pre-enshittification phase of low prices and less advertising. That will inevitably go away and get replaced with a much worse deal.
