The thought experiment I like to have is imagining my company running without engineers and just LLMs. The thought of my CEO or sales guys sitting down and reading/redirecting LLMs all day is just hilarious. My CEO is highly technical but he has other shit to do. The first thing they'd do is hire someone to do that for them, and the best person for that task is someone who knows how things _should_ be.

Now they'll probably get someone on discount, because our salaries are going to tank due to evaporating demand, but I sincerely doubt it'll be zero-d demand.

What I expect is a 3D printer moment - tons and tons of homebrew / shareware style software coming out, an explosion of boutique code.

I also expect a CNC machine moment - vastly reduced demand for hands-on specialists, and more babysitting of automted processes. But it's those machinists who got those jobs.

We could be looking at a long term suppression (~80% reduction?) in demand though until economic growth produces enough demand to employ ~50M software engineers again, if ever. The cliff is unlikely, I'd guess the unregretted loss will be replaced by AI productivity every year, and some portion of growth will, too.

I also guess that all the AI companies can become massively successful without causing much unemployment just by following Claude's model - charge a certain tangible % of a salary for assisting the worker. https://jodavaho.io/posts/ai-jobpocolypse.html