I’ve thought about psychology. I know LLMs can work as pseudo-therapists but I feel like that’s a field where the human connection / human element will remain important.
On one hand some jobs with human element are safe, at first. Think of artists being made obsolete by the camera. Portrait artists became mostly obsolete, but we still pay for art. It's the story behind the art that became important. Or, I still go to cafes with nice atmosphere and friendly staff. There are restaurants with robot staff here in Japan, much cheaper. After the meal you pay at the table without ever talking to a person. But it does not feel nice to sit in there, so I gladly pay a premium for the nice coffee.
On the other hand, it is not only software jobs in danger, but all office jobs. So a lot of people may suddenly be out of money. Let's say you open a cafe, but no one has money to come and pay. Society has to change a lot from the current model to be able to handle this.
I think applying AI to other white collar roles that also require problem solving but do not have as much training, will prove much more difficult. Even coding on proprietary dominated domains is a much, much worse experience than people have with more accessible code. Using it for electronics has been hit or miss, embedded software is a bit shakey, game development is also challenging to use it for etc.
I honestly figured that’s why everyone is coming out with MS Office plugins for all the models, and MS itself is putting it in the tools.
So if most any company only needs one person to solve limited IT issues, prompt code production and deployment, generate the usual truckloads of excel spreadsheets, and do most of the finance and accounting… it starts to look pretty scary.
Then, what about the people making and maintaining all the facilities for these people we don’t need anymore? The world flipped its lid about commercial real estate when wfh became a thing. That was relatively small and temporary.
And all the small businesses like local restaurants and coffee shops that they frequent, etc, etc.
There are so many 2nd order contagion impacts if the knowledge work economy implodes that very few people won't be negatively impacted to some significant degree.
And some people seem to think that outcome means the government will step in and engineer some sort of soft landing. And outside of the US this may very well be true, but here in the US? Seems unlikely.
LLMs suit some jobs more than others. Its quite possible SWE's are the only profession massively affected - whether that means a evolution of the role or decline/death is another question.
I could say the same thing for software engineers I know as recently as the middle of last year, things can change very quickly.
Up until about December 2025 the fact that LLMs would replace us all (SWEs) was the punchline to a joke for most working developers I know. But most of the ones I know aren't laughing anymore, unless its a nervous laugh.
LLMs may (likely will) disrupt software developers first, but I don't think we are particularly unique and I don't see any reason why the same risks won't spread to virtually all knowledge work, especially if executives in those fields see a significant amount of SWEs being replaced by LLMs as an initial test case.
We'll see.
They may never reach that point.
But even if they never get good enough to replace all software developers, they can still cause massive job losses by allowing companies to do the same work with far fewer developers.
Unfortunately the workflow of a software engineer has been to do things like asking questions on stack overflow to do their job - to use digital resources scattered across the web - to show examples of code freely across the web.
The workflow of an accountant, portfolio manager etc has nothing to do with accessing and using the web in the same manner. If you did their jobs you’d know this, but you don’t. Right?
Is it really a surprise? Nope. Thankfully writing code isn't enough. So your job is still somewhat safe for now.
Professional accreditation and responsibility is its only real moat. And those are “yeah but!” issues we hand-wave in discussions around swe too.
Otherwise those are more vulnerable.
Most importantly there's often a period of general uncertainty and adoption, during which the new law is already in force, but LLMs will rely on whatever there was previously.
Most people find this job stressful and boring, but the same can be said about software engineering. Regular people pay money to have it dealt with.
Overall I think there will always be demand for handling the messiness of the real world and humans have the upperhand here because they learn as they go, not via release cycles costing a sizeable sum and taking months.
Seriously if the future manifests, all of these standard effort based jobs would become redundant...
The issue with outdated information is way overstated, it'd just add the current rules to the context when evaluating and be done with it. We're already at 1 million context size... That's enough for a lot of rules - and the number will likely go higher as time progresses
A condo costs $2500/month so I will either be homeless and freeze to death or be euthanized.
Maybe I'm a contrarian but I don't think there's hope for anyone that doesn't control resources.
Best choice would be moving up north and slaving in a mineral mine along with everyone else that lost their jobs. Like the 1920s.
I don't see myself being qualified for such a role since I am too short and don't have the physical leverage.
It was manual labour first. Then there were teactors. Now robots join in - does that mean that personel cutting grass is obsolete? No , you need all of them. That means that city becomes nicer.
With software and AI I somehow feel the same will happen. How many features have you skipped just because it would help some niche set of users and PM or Management would not approve the spending. It is low priority. Or bugs that were annoying but financially not bringing much value.
I hope switching some work to AI , some companies will capture opportunity to make software better while others will make the same software cheaper
I think many of us who have been in software for a while will fantasize about low-tech jobs, I imagine there will be a bunch of hobby farms...