What contingency plan is there exactly? At best you're just going from an automated-already job to a soon-to-be-automated job. Yay?

I'm baffled that so many people think that only developers are going to be hit and that we especially deserve it. If AI gets so good that you don't need people to understand code anymore, I don't know why you'd need a project manager anymore either, or a CFO, or a graphic designer, etc etc. Even the people that seem to think they're irreplaceable because they have some soft power probably aren't. Like, do VC funds really need humans making decisions in that context..?

Anyway, the practical reason why I'm not screaming in terror right now is because I think the hype machine is entirely off the rails and these things can't be trusted with real jobs. And honestly, I'm starting to wonder how much of tech and social media is just being spammed by bots and sock puppets at this point, because otherwise I don't understand why people are so excited about this hypothetical future. Yay, bots are going to do your job for you while a small handful of business owners profit. And I guess you can use moltbot to manage your not-particularly-busy life of unemployment. Well, until you stop being able to afford the frontier models anyway, which is probably going to dash your dream of vibe coding a startup. Maybe there's a handful of winners, until there's not, because nobody can afford to buy services on a wage of zero dollars. And anyone claiming that the abundance will go to everyone needs to get their head checked.

My contingency plan is that if AI leaves me unable to get a job, we are all fucked and society as a whole will have to fix the situation and if it doesn’t, there is nothing I could have done about it anyway.

> You are in danger. Unless you estimate the odds of a breakthrough at <5%

It's not the odds of the breakthrough, but the timeline. A factory worker could have correctly seen that one day automation would replace him, and yet worked his entire career in that role.

There have been a ton of predictions about software engineers, radiologists, and some other roles getting replaced in months. Those predictions have clearly been not so great.

At this point the greater risk to my career seems to be the economy tanking, as that seems to be happening and ongoing. Unfortunately, switching careers can't save you from that.

I'm not worried about the danger of losing my job to an AI capable of performing it. I'm worried about the danger of losing my job because an executive wanted to be able to claim that AI has enhanced productivity to such a degree that they were able to eliminate redundancies with no regard for whether there was any truth to that statement or not.

> it is straight-up irresponsible to forgo making a contingency plan.

What contingencies can you really make?

Start training a physical trade, maybe.

If this the end of SWE jobs, you better ride the wave. Odds are you're estimate on when AI takes over are off by half a career, anyways.

So AI is going to steamroll all feasible jobs, all at once, with no alternatives developing over time? That's just a fantasy.

> Unless you estimate the odds of a breakthrough at <5%

I do. Show me any evidence that it is imminent.

> or you expect that AI will usher in enough prosperity that your job will be irrelevant

Not in my lifetime.

> it is straight-up irresponsible to forgo making a contingency plan.

No, I'm actually measuring the risk, you're acting as if the sky is falling. What's your contingency plan? Buy a subscription to the revolution?

> leading to one of those situations where a bunch of people get fired for no reason and then re-hired again after some time.

More likely they get fired for no reason, never rehired, and the people left get burned out trying to hold it all together.

As if "higher-ups" is an assigned position.

If you fail as a "higher up" you're no longer higher up. Then someone else can take your place. To the extent this does not naturally happen is evidence of petty or major corruptions within the system.

Curious to hear if you've seen this work with 100k+ LoC codebases (i.e. what you could expect at a job). I've had some good experiences with high autonomy agents in smaller codebases and simpler systems but the coherency starts to fizzle out when the system gets complicated enough that thinking it through is the hard part as opposed to hammering out the code.

We have this in some of our projects too but I always wonder how long it's going to take until it just fails. Nobody reads all those memory files for accuracy. And knowing what kind of BS the AI spews regularly in day to day use I bet this simply doesn't scale.

this works fine for like 2-3 small instruction sets. once you start getting to scale of a real enterprise system, the AI falls down and can't handle that amount of context. It will start ignoring critical pieces or not remember them. And without constant review AI will start priotizing things that are not your business priority.

I don't agree they have solved this problem, at all, or really in any way that's actually usable.

Big tech might ahead of the rest of the economy in this experiment. Microsoft grew headcount by ~3% from June 2022 to June 2025 while revenue grew by >40%. This is admittedly weak anecdata but my subjective experience is their products seem to be crumbling (GitHub problems around the Azure migration for instance), and worse than they even were before. We'll see how they handle hiring over the next few years and if that reveals anything.

Already built in. We haven’t hired recently and our developers are engaged in a Cold War to set the new standard of productivity.

Why do you think it's not a physical sciences problem? It could be the case that current technologies simply cannot scale due to fundamental physical issues. It could even be a fundamental rule of intelligent life, that one cannot create intelligence that surpasses its own.

Plenty of things get substantial resources and investment and go nowhere.

Of course I could be totally wrong and it's solved in the next couple years, it's almost impossible to make these predictions either way. But I get the feeling people are underestimating what it takes to be truly intelligent, especially when efficiency is important.

Many highly motivated people with substantial resources and investment have worked on a lot of things and then failed at them with nothing to show for it.

The implication of your assertion is pretty much a digital singularity. You’re implying that there will be no need for humans to interact with the digital world at all, because any work in the digital world will be achievable by AI.

Wonder what that means for meatspace.

Edit: Would also disagree this isn’t a physics problem. Pretty sure power required scales according to problem complexity. At a certain level of problem complexity we’re pretty much required to put enough carbon in the atmosphere to cook everyone to a crisp.

Edit 2: illustrative example, an Epic in Jira: “Design fusion reactor”

Here's an example ticket that I'll probably work on next week:

    Live stream validation results as they come in

- What is the validation system and how does it work today?

- What sort of UX do we want? What are the specific deficiencies in the current UX that we're trying to fix?

- What prior art exists on the backend and frontend, and how much of that can/should be reused?

- Are there any scaling or load considerations that need to be accounted for?

I'll probably implement this as 2-3 PRs in a chain touching different parts of the codebase. GPT via Codex will write 80% of the code, and I'll cover the last 20% of polish. Throughout the process I'll prompt it in the right direction when it runs up against questions it can't answer, and check its assumptions about the right way to push this out. I'll make sure that the tests cover what we need them to and that the resultant UX feels good. I'll own the responsibility for covering load considerations and be on the line if anything falls over.

Does it look like software engineering from 3 years ago? Absolutely not. But it's software engineering all the same even if I'm not writing most of the code anymore.

Then why isn't it? Just offload it to the clankers and go enjoy a margarita at the beach or something.

Why do you have a backlog then? If a current AI can do 100% of it then just run it over the weekend and close everything

I think the "well defined prompt" is precisely what the person you responded to is alluring to. They are saying they don't get worried because AI doesn't get the job done without someone behind it that knows exactly what to prompt.

>>I look at my ticket tracker and I see basically 100% of it that can be done by AI.

That's a sign that you have spurious problems under those tickets or you have a PM problem.

Also, a job is a not a task- if your company has jobs which is a single task then those jobs would definitely be gone.

What factor of increased productivity will lead to reduced need for programmers?

I have seen numerous 25-50% productivity boosts over my career. Not a single one of them reduced the overall need for programmers.

I can’t even think of one that reduced the absolute number of programmers in a specific field.

Codex with their flagship model (currently GPT-5.3-Codex) is my daily driver. I still end up doing a lot of steering!

Exactly. This happens in every aspect of life. Something convenient comes along and people will accommodate it despite it being worse, because people don’t care.