I think there will be larger markets, more companies, more jobs than before due to AI, but also a very painful transition period
AI reduces the cost of producing software (and other intellectual tasks), which greatly improves the viability for more and more ambitious projects. As far as we know the amount of problems software (and humanity) can solve is unbounded
It feels like the market has shifted in SWE yet again to heavily prioritize a new set of skills, of which those in the top quartile are desired more than ever
The problems in any domain are infinite. But, alas, money is not.
What are these skills?
This is the magic question that I'm very eager to hear the answer to.
Fundamentally, steering LLMs requires the same structured, logical thought process that is required to write code, regardless of abstraction level. Unlike what HN would have you believe this is not a skill that is equally distributed across the population.
But given the rapid pace at which this technology is evolving, "steering" may very well be ceded to the clankers. LLM agents are fantastic at logical reasoning & any inefficiencies relative to human experts can be circumvented by sheer compute.
Being able to work with an infinite amount of dumb interns that work super fast and have a vast amount of knowledge.