AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

Wait till we realize that nobody is buying the software we vibe code anyway.

We've seen this game before, with the Dot Bomb and 9/11. A lot of you have 6 figure jobs that will simply be gone next year after the election, never to return.

That winter lasted about 5 years until 2007 when the iPhone and social media sites like Facebook went mainstream. This winter won't end. Or more accurately, it is the end.

Maybe we should stop debating whether we're in a crisis and start looking at the 5-10 year endgame of the Singularity. We're entering the eventuality that many of us have predicted since the arrival of the internet 30+ years ago, that prices will get lower but nobody will have any money to buy anything anyway. The feeling that we're doing something wrong with our lives will continue to intensify. We'll try so hard, and get so far, but in the end, it doesn't even matter.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm turning my attention away from trying to play the job game with AI. I'm looking instead at how we can provide time/money/resources to the middle class after capitalism can no longer provide them.

A conservative friend of mine just read the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, which I didn't see coming, especially since he beat me to it. In the neurodivergent spirit of not being able to do anything alone, what if we all read it?

https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/marx-manifesto

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Man...

I'm predicting that it stops just short of what full automation can provide. Loosely the evolution of economics goes: hunter-gatherer -> agrarian- > feudalist -> capitalist -> socialist -> communist. And now solarpunk (or something).

The working class is looking forward to the next chapter, but the capitalist class is looking backward to neofeudalism.

Those two directions can't coexist, so what does the future hold? Well, it's always darkest before dawn:

"It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." - Mark Fisher.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ Mark Fisher: The Slow Cancellation of the Future

https://www.scribd.com/document/835022535/Mark-Fisher-The-Sl... (transcript)

https://goodscienceproject.org/articles/the-slow-cancellatio...

https://mediationsjournal.org/articles/end-of-world

If the endgame of capitalism is that it inevitably eats itself, then the game now isn't how to get more money and do nothing with it, but instead how to start doing something with no money.

I should add that even if I'm exploring anti-capitalist futures, that doesn't make me socialist. I don't like the 6 hour daily work requirement of many socialist societies. I think we can do better than that and get closer to 0, so that we can shrug off wage slavery and finally get real work done.

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AI gives more leverage to exceptional people, its an amplifier not an extender

Economics would have always created this downward pressure on demand for software engineers regardless, either companies would replace the number of engineers they need with AI, or with low paid offshored workers.

I don't know what kind of company has got a large codebase and it's taking 20,000 loc pr's expecting that shit to be sustainable, but I work AI first and at the most PR's are touching 12 to 15 files, with the more radical ones sitting at 30. They are still human-reviewable. They are still the kind of change you can revert back to original without breaking all the rest... there are ways of doing this stuff, dear luddites.

> The engineer opening a 25,000-line PR should have stopped the agent long before it got there.

So many A car is simply a faster horse arguments being made here.

The “You must review every line of code” camp are going to be in for a seriously bad time when Claude/Grok/etc starts writing machine code, and they absolutely will and you will look like a crazy person the same way as those who said we can’t trust compilers back in the 1970s.

Breaking up code into small reviewable pieces is obsolete advice from legacy software engineering. We will probably be reviewing prompts or functional simulations as a form of review. Which brings me to the point that a Senior engineer in 5 years will look absolutely nothing like a Senior engineer in 2019.