When the big lawsuits hit, they'll roll back.
They'll hire those people back at half their total compensation, with no stock, far fewer benefits, to clean up AI slop. And or just contract it overseas at ~1/3 the former total cost.
Another ten years from now the AI systems will have improved drastically, reducing the slop factor. There's no scenario where it goes back to how it was, that era is over. And the cost will decline substantially versus the peak for US developers.
Because I think it won't just be a linear relationship. If you let 1 vibe coder replace a team of 10, you'll need a lot more than 10 people to clean it up and maintain it going forward when they hit the wall.
Personally I'm looking forward to the news stories about major companies collapsing under the weight of their LLM-induced tech debt.
Why does that fact stop being true when the code is created by AI?