They still gotta figure out how their consumers will get the cash to consume. Toss all the developers and a largish cohort of well-paid people head towards the dole.

Yeah I don't think this get's enough attention. It still requires a technical person to use these things effectively. Building coherent systems that solve a business problem is an iterative process. I have a hard time seeing how an LLM could climb that mountain on it's own.

I don't think there's a way to solve the issue of: one-shotted apps will increasingly look more convincing, in the same way that the image generation looks more convincing. But when you peel back the curtain, that output isn't quite correct enough to deploy to production. You could try brute-force vibe iterating until it's exactly what you wanted, but that rarely works for anything that isn't a CRUD app.

Ask any of the image generators to build you a sprite sheet for a 2d character with multiple animation frames. I have never gotten one to do this successfully in one prompt. Sometimes the background will be the checkerboard png transparency layer. Except, the checkers aren't all one color (#000000, #ffffff), instead it's a million variations of off-white and off-black. The legs in walking frames are almost never correct, etc.

And even if they get close - as soon as you try to iterate on the first output, you enter a game of whack-a-mole. Okay we fixed the background but now the legs don't look right, let's fix those. Okay great legs are fixed but now the faces are different in every frame let's fix those. Oh no fixing the faces broke the legs again, Etc.

We are in a weird place where companies are shedding the engineers that know how to use these things. And some of those engineers will become solo-devs. As a solo-dev, funds won't be infinite. So it doesn't seem likely that they can jack up the prices on the consumer plans. But if companies keep firing developers, then who will actually steer the agents on the enterprise plans?

Like before - debt!

This prevents the consumers from slacking off and enjoying life, instead they have to continue to work work work. They get to consume a little, and work much more (after all, they also have to pay interest, and for consumer credits and credits that the masses get that adds up to a lot).

In this scenario, it does not even matter that many are unable to pay off all that debt. As long as the amount of work that is extracted from them significantly exceeds the amount of consumption allowed to them all is fine.

The chains that bind used to be metal, but we progressed and became a civilized society. Now it's the financial system and the laws. “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” (Anatole France)

Why do we need people to consume when we have the government?

Serious question. As in, we built the last 100 years on "the american consumer", the idea that it would be the people buying everything. There is no reason that needs to or necessarily will continue-- don't get me wrong, I kind of hope it does, but my hopes don't always predict what actually happens.

What if the next 100 is the government buying everything, and the vast bulk of the people are effectively serfs. Who HAVE to stay in line otherwise they go to debt prison or tax prison where they become slaves (yes, the US has a fairly large population of prison laborers who are forced to work for 15-50 cents/hour. The lucky ones can earn as much as $1.50/hour. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2017/04/10/wages/

At some point rich people stop caring about money and only care about power.