I've seen this argument a few times before and I'm never quite convinced by it because, well, all those arguments are correct. It was an existential threat to the scribes and destroyed their jobs, the majority of printed books are considered less aesthetically pleasing than a properly illuminated manuscript, and hand copying is considered a spiritual act by many traditions.

I'm not sure if I say it's a correct argument, but considering everyone in this thread is a lot closer to being a scribe than a printing press owner, I'm surprised there's less sympathy.

Exactly.

What makes it even more odd for me is they are mostly describing doing nothing when using their agents. I see the "providing important context, setting guardrails, orchestration" bits appended, and it seems like the most shallow, narrowest moat one can imagine. Why do people believe this part is any less tractable for future LLMs? Is it because they spent years gaining that experience? Some imagined fuzziness or other hand-waving while muttering something about the nature of "problem spaces"? That is the case for everything the LLMs are toppling at the moment. What is to say some new pre-training magic, post-training trick, or ingenious harness won't come along and drive some precious block of your engineering identity into obsolescence? The bits about 'the future is the product' are even stranger (the present is already the product?).

To paraphrase theophite on Bluesky, people seem to believe that if there is a well free for all to draw from, that there will still exist a substantial market willing to pay them to draw from this well.

The point being missed is the printing press led to tens of millions of jobs and billions of dollars in revenue.

So far, when a new technology is introduced that people were initially afraid of, end up creating a whole new set of jobs and industries.

But the world is better of with the scribes unemployed: ideas get to spread, more people can educate themselves through printed books.

Maybe the world is better off with fewer coders, as more software ideas can materialize into working software faster?