You may be right if AI truly can never replace devs. But history shows many examples of inadequate technologies getting hammered on by industry until they work due to distorted perceptions of economic gain. I’ve heard stories like this regarding mechanical looms, CNC, and cloud services. My understanding is those all work (decently) now not because they were obviously better, but because economic pressure pushed innovation to make them work, for better or worse.

> Juniors need to leap into their careers and build up a good head of steam by demonstrating acquired experience,

Junior devs at least have the option of building a portfolio of usefully software on their own machine at home, while eating ramens.

They can build websites for mom'n'pop stores. They can participate into open source projects. Etc, etc...

I dread the people who won't get jobs into other fields because managers have been told by corporate that "we don't need people, chatgpt can do everything".

You can buy a Tesla with FSD today. It works. Sure there are some corner cases, but it's good enough in enough cases to get in, punch in a destination, and get you there. But you have to buy a Tesla, and they only come in electric. Waymo's are fine too, you just have to live in a supported area. The real gem for self driving, is Comma.ai.

It's an aftermarket system, but can be installed in most newish cars with a built in lane guidance system. Even a Corolla. And it's really want we want. It's not self-driving, it'll just take you down the freeway and you don't have to do anything except wait for your GPS to tell you to exit (and then you have to exit). Freeway-grade gurves in the road? Fine. Stop and go traffic? Handled. It's better than Tesla's FSD in two specific ways. One is that because it's not self-driving, it's way easier to trust the system because it's not going to change lanes or anything surprising on you. It's not going to do something fancy, just brake or accelerate or follow the lane or car in front of you left or right. I highly recommend it to anyone who does any amount of freeway driving. If not for the coolness of it then simply the safety aspect. Now, I'm sure everyone here is a better driver than most (though that has a problem, mathematically), but this thing is better than a tired/angry/drunk version of someone else driving.

But as you point out, most people are still driving their own cars.

Which, I think is where we're going to see the software development industry going. There's gonna be the AI maximalists, who, like Waymo and FSD, will have AI basically do everything. And then there's the pragmatists, for whom AI doesn't do everything, just enough to be useful.

Then there's everyone else, still writing their own code. Thing is, an app on your computer isn't a car. It's $20/month if not free if you're a total cheapskate, to get codex or claude or another assistant, vs many thousands of dollars for a self-driving or partially self-driving car. The other difference is in time. The value of a partially self-driving car (FSD or Comma) is in the mental fatigue of driving, and in improved safety, but a 7 hour road trip is still going to take 7 hours even if you're not driving. The only time a self-driving car helps is if you're going cross-city in a Waymo, and you're in the back seat working on your laptop. AI assisted coding though is different. If I take on projects I wouldn't do before with AI, that's a win for me. If I'm able to write software faster and with fewer bugs with AI, that's also a win for me, but also a win for my employer. If, however, it goes the other way and I write more bugs, then that's a loss for me and my employer.

The counterpoint to this is that information is sealed up in bottles that previously haven't been worth it to be unsealed. How much can you charge for the source code to a program writing in Zig to calculate the fibonacci sequence? That's worth approximately zero. But generating a million tested programs, with source code, that have been run through a compiler and test suite, to be used as "information" suddenly becomes worth it to the AI labs to buy up, if not generate for themselves. So imo there's still ways to go, even if the human Internet isn't growing as much post-AI as in all the years before it.