This is actually what I'm most excited about: in the reasonably near future, productivity will be related to who is most creative and who has the most interesting problems rather than who's spent the most hours behind a specific toolchain/compiler/language. Solutions to practical problems won't be required to go through a layer of software engineer. It's going to be amazing, and I'm going to be without a job.
Why stop at software? AI will do this to pretty much every discipline and artform, from music and painting, to law and medicine. Learning, mastery, expertise, and craftsmanship are obsolete; there's no need to expend 10,000 hours developing a skill when the AI has already spent billions of hours in the cloud training in its hyperbolic time chamber. Academia and advanced degrees are worthless; you can compress four years of study into a prompt the size of a tweet.
The idea guy will become the most important role in the coming aeon of AI.
Consumer apps may see less sales as people opt to just clone an app using AI for their own personal use, customized for their preferences.
But there’s a lot of engineering being done out there that people don’t even know exists, and that has to be done by people who know exactly what they’re doing, not just weekend warriors shouting stuff at an LLM.
Except that the expectation of them is going to be higher and higher possibly with a downward pressure on compensation. I guess it'll find equilibrium somewhere eventually.