If all you (not you specifically, more of a royal “you” or “we”) are is a collection of skills centered around putting code into an editor and opening pull requests as fast as possible, then sure, you might be cooked.

But if your job depends on taste, design, intuition, sociability, judgement, coaching, inspiring, explaining, or empathy in the context of using technology to solve human problems, you’ll be fine. The premium for these skills is going _way_ up.

> The irony is that I haven't seen AI have nearly as large of an impact anywhere else.

We are in this pickle because programmers are good at making tools that help programmers. Programming is the tip of the spear, as far as AI's impact goes, but there's more to come.

Why pay an expensive architect to design your new office building, when AI will do it for peanuts? Why pay an expensive lawyer to review your contract? Why pay a doctor, etc.

Short term, doing for lawyers, architects, civil engineers, doctors, etc what Claude Code has done for programmers is a winning business strategy. Long term, gaining expertise in any field of intellectual labor is setting yourself up to be replaced.

> what I'm seeing is that all of the skills that my training and years of experience have helped me hone are now implemented by these tools to the level that I know most businesses would be satisfied by.

So when things break or they have to make changes, and the AI gets lost down a rabbit hole, who is held accountable?

> translating business requirements into a technical specification

a.k.a. Being a programmer.

> The irony is that I haven't seen AI have nearly as large of an impact anywhere else.

What lol. Translation? Graphic design?

> After working with the latest models I think these "it's just another tool" or "another layer of abstraction" or "I'm just building at a different level" kind of arguments are wishful thinking. You're not going to be a designer writing blueprints for a series of workers to execute on, you're barely going to be a product manager translating business requirements into a technical specification before AI closes that gap as well

I think it's doubtful you'll be even that; certainly not with the salary and status that normally entails.

> I'm very convinced non-technical people will be able to use these tools

This suggests that the skill ceiling of "Vibe Coding" is actually quite low, calling into question the sense of urgency with which certain AI influnecers present it, as if it were a skill that you need to invest major time & effort to hone now (with their help, of course), lest you get left behind and have to "catch up" later. Yet one could easily see it being akin to Googling, which was also a skill (when Google was usable), one that did indeed increase your efficiency and employable, but with a low ceiling, such that "Googler" was never a job by itself, the way some suggest "prompt engineer" will be. The Google analogy is apt, in that you're typing keywords into a blackbox until it spits out what you want; quite akin to how people describe "prompt engineering."

Also the Vibe Coding skillset--a bag of tricks and book of incantations you're told can cajole the model--has a high churn rate. Once, narrow context windows meant restarting a session de novo was advisable if you hit a roadblock, but now it's usually the opposite.

If this all true, then wouldn't the correct takeaway, rather than embracing and mastering "Vibe Coding" (as influencers suggest), be to "pivot" to a new career, like welding?

> The irony is that I haven't seen AI have nearly as large of an impact anywhere else. We truly have automated ourselves out of work, people are just catching up with that fact

What's funny is artists immediately, correctly perceived the threat of AI. You didn't see cope about it being "just another tool, like Photoshop."

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