Your entire post is self selection bias and survivorship bias.

SWE field is one of the most cognitive dissonant social groups; cries foul at the slightest whiff their free speech and agency is being put upon; seeks to reduce blockers to their productivity, fewer PMs! Less management!

Now complains about users using their machines without having to block on an SWE.

Insert that quote about how someone will not see the obvious if their paycheck relies on them ignoring the obvious.

Here come LLMs and all they can accomplish with a few arithmetical rules instead of the arbitrary semantics of an SWE; watch as SWEs block social evolution away from disrupting software engineers.

As an example; "protected memory", among many other individual software problems, is an access control problem mired in old semantics relative to OS monoliths.

Didn’t see you all halting as you decimated travel agent jobs, retail jobs, etc etc. Technology advancement must now stand still after centuries of evolution? The self selection bias is as obvious as Trump's.

dimator captured the point I was hoping to make, more eloquently than I could hope to. I defer to their comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46725512

That said, to address your broader point: me, personally, I am thrilled that the barrier to entry for building software has been all but eliminated. The joy of creation belongs to us all.

you couldn't have missed GP's point any more if you tried. ignoring the ad-hominems about SWE greed:

these tools have been trained on decades of people "obsessing over every last detail". what GP is arguing is that we're detaching from that: you prompt, you get something that works, it doesn't matter how it got there. we're now entering the world where the majority of code will be vibed. So whatever our foredevelopers came up with, that will be the the final chapter of craftsman-produced, understood, code. whatever the previous generation actually learned about software engineering, that's at an end too, because why bother learning when i can prompt.

there's no stopping this transition, obviously. the next generation of tools will be trained on the current generation of tools' generated code. we're passed the "termination shock" of sofwtare understanding.

It’s all fun and games until it happens to you…

>Didn’t see you all halting as you decimated travel agent jobs, retail jobs, etc etc.

You have to remember that SWE's are the same group that screams "communism" the first moment you mention the word union and they should have the right to make as much money as possible with no restrictions.

This of course leads to the obvious lack of self reflection in their responses when something threatens their future income.