The AI arms race is going to destroy software engineering forever

The last few months have seen a massive shift in attention to LLMs obviously, and the AI arms race seems to have officially broken out of its research labs into the "real" world.

There has been tons of ink spilled on how this will affect and change the world in general, but before AI can do any of that it's going to cause a massive, relentless distraction for every software engineer currently employed, and every place that produces software products.

At first, AI adoption may look like a value add, with battle lines being drawn between the haves and the have not.

But with significant proliferation and deployment, it's likely that the building of black boxes that nobody truly understands with become the norm.

During the deployment phase, attention and resources will be diverted from software development teams doing coding to specialized consultants, who will not reveal their methods or maybe even their source code to maintain leverage over the competition.

This will inevitably lead to the discreditation of software engineers and software engineering itself. The software industry will experience a prolonged dark age where writing code will be scoffed at, bot maintainers will be scarce, and things may work but they will always be slightly wrong with no verifiable results that anyone can observe based on input.

Prompt engineers will be everywhere and paid something close to minimum wage once handwritten code is shunned.

Software shops will start to resemble their historical predecessor: the typing pool, and could become what was once considered "women's work" again.

The disturbing features of all of this pale in comparison to the end game scenario, because there likely be no way back for software engineering.

In this case the "haves" will have so much concentrated power in relatively few hands, that AI overlords will not be able to resist enslaving entire masses of people who will be powerless to stop them, as government control structures are infected with for profit private systems, which cannot be escaped.

Because content sources aka books will no longer be trusted, people will ignore them, making the maintenance and belief in legal systems obsolete, leading to anarchy, and reactionary govt controls implemented at all levels of society.

Individual emotional experiences will become muted or cease to exist. Words such as "fun","love" and "friendship" will fall out of use as they will no longer be experienced.

AI powers will eventually go to war with each other using AI itself to do the fighting, and the planet earth will be systematically destroyed leaving nothing but nuclear winter.

The end.