Its easy to be optimistic when you're sitting on millions (dhh). You literally don't need to care about how any of this affects your job security.
There is a world of difference of having tens of millions of dollars and paying hundreds of dollars a month for AI subscriptions vs someone making 100k / year doing the same.
For the DHH's of the world that's not even something to think about, but for most people who are working (even in tech), now we're talking 2-8%+ of your income depending how much you use AI. Just to have the "luxury" of being able to experiment with it. I use air quotes on luxury because I personally find a lot of AI results to be quite bad, but then again, I'm not spending hundreds of dollars a month on the premium models.
Plenty of jobs have expenses built into them. Maybe a subscription is more than it used to be, I had great jobs on a used 200$ thinkpad, but it's still cheaper than being a photographer. And 100k is more than most jobs.
Software dev, even if it's all agents now, is still pretty dang economical
I am definitely not having a blast at work with LLMs. Everyone in the team has become simple rubber-stampers for whatever the AI puts out. There are mountains of documentation which gives a false sense of understanding of how things work, but the code repository itself could have been written in Brainfuck and it would make almost no difference. And we keep getting told by management that this is fine. We've become simple janitors in the slop hall.
Everyone in the team has become simple
rubber-stampers for whatever the AI puts out.
1. Present a big AI PR to a fellow human for review 2. Understand a big AI PR, as a human reviewer
...is going to be a hero. This is one of the biggest unsolved problems of this new era.
I've been experimenting with this, but it's early days. My efforts are mostly along the lines of having AI generate artifacts that guide the reviewer through the PR in execution flow order, explaining the reason for changes along the way.
I send a ton of requests and even reaching $10 for the month would take more calls than I have capacity to review and use. And as I said, that's for a ton of requests.
At work, it seems a bit different - I'm certainly having to declaudify things it can be hard starting there's a lot to dig into - you can see it's overwritten but need to understand every detail to sort it out.
But I also think that premise is bullshit and not gonna happen.
Probably going to if I want to keep my job, since I'll be making about the same amount of money moving boxes or cleaning toilets, only in much less comfortable conditions.
It's essentially trying to turn programming into a micro-transaction based pay to play / pay to win outcome, a concept that was gaming related for decades.
There is no future without these models. They truly are an entirely different league than the cheap stuff. You can move mountains with Astra or Opus 5.5.
Like the other commentor said, its just going to be a net negative, because whatever productivity increase you supposedly do get, you will see exactly 0 of that translated into salary increase.
Previously, the tools in our field were free or trivial cost. Seems like that has changed, that's OK, there are models to solve that.
I teach a couple courses currently, there is an enormous gap between what my students can create with AI and what I can create with AI. I don't think it's that much smaller than the difference of what we can create without, the only difference is that the schedules are compressed.
Additionally, if I'm 10% more productive I don't get a 10% pay increase.
Mountains that were made out of molehills, an ever-growing heap of bullshit.
Here is the description for the Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote:
"Opening Keynote highlighting what's new in Rails, what's coming next, and where Rails is headed in the future."
DHH literally did not cover that. Not even close!
The first response in the conference chat described it as the "worst opening keynote possible to setup the Rails World conference." While someone soon disagreed with that, another guy later said he felt it undermined the later talks, and someone else said the Laracon conference had more about what the framework is doing in the AI age. He barely mentioned Rails. I get how he was excited about his experiments but I certainly wish he had focused more on what Rails is doing for this new era.
It’s natural to be pessimistic if you are unskilled. Your ability to keep your job is directly proportional to how good you are.