fwiw this is how it's always been. You don't have to be some kind of extreme extrovert, but people who are good at what they do tend to enjoy working with other people who are good at what they do, and when they see someone they recognize as "I'd work with this guy again" they put in the minimal effort to stay in contact - a hello text every few months, a cup of coffee every few years, that type of thing. Thats all it takes. If you're not doing that, yeah, you're in for a world of hurt when you go job hunting.

Selecting where to apply and who you contact for it is also very important.

I'm currently involved in the hiring process in our company, selecting engineers for my team. If someone applies who has the programming language we ask for in their CV, they get a first interview. If they can read code, and write VERY basic code, they will get through at least the first 2 rounds without any issues.

If people put down the AI, and actually learn how to write a `for` loop, they would be more hire-able than 50% of candidates.

> "Guess it's death [...] for introverts"

There is a meritocracy somewhere in our capitalist system. Not everyone participates, but it exists.

Seems like that is the case, yes.

Bro I'm an introvert and I have work connections. It isn't hard.

Anyone who has been in the industry for several years or more should have people they can reach out to. That’s not being well connected.

This is really just a reversion to how things used to work, relying on human connections. People seemed to manage to get jobs 30 years ago just fine

Competing software companies will offer more and more advanced software that handles more use cases, faster, better, with more features, with more compatibility, with more flexibility, with more integrations, with more ease of use, with more etc etc. They will propose software solutions for things that are currently not economical to provide. And other competing software companies will have to match that or do even more.

I wouldn't be so sure. I have been impressed by several things that seem to be complex but a way to be automated was found. Sure a no controlled environment is not conducive to automation, but who said a tow truck wouldn't be a part of the process? Washing a car has been automated with the precursor that the car is brought to the controlled environment first.

I have even replaced car tires before and yet still have this opinion.

https://www.pitproauto.com/ is working on that!

Are most cars not just undoing the lock, the bolts, switching the tire and redoing the bolts and locks?

How are these put on in the first place on an assembly line?

> I don't think it's a psychologically positive self identification to see yourself merely as a gatekeeper and toll extractor rent seeker who only makes a living by withholding agency and skill from others.

That's an incredibly uncharitable reading of the parent comment. At no point in history prior to maybe this year could you argue that working in software was gatekeeping, toll extracting, or rent seeking. Being a highly skilled craftsperson creating software for those who can't or don't want to is a very psychologically positive self identification. Lamenting that the industry is moving away from highly skilled craftspeople is also perfectly valid, even if you believe that it is somehow good for society, which is yet to become clear.

Oh I cannot agree with this at all.

If you think any programming task at hand one must have at least some reasonable grasp of formalism, boolean logic, predicate logic, then understanding the software developing concepts, your APIs frameworks, language constructs etc and finally the domain knowledge.Most of this goes away when changing from coding to prompting.

I was just doing some computer graphics work myself doing Signed Distance Fields and Claude just literally regurgitated code that I could just adopt (since it works) without understanding any of the math involved.

I'd say that prompting is at least two orders of magnitude easier than coding.

Many things only have value because of scarcity.

Digital products such as "photoshop" have had value because people need a tool like that and there's only a limited number of competition, i.e. scarcity. The scarcity exists because of the cost. I.e. the cost of creating "photoshop"creates limit for how many "photoshops" exist. When you bring down the cost you'll have more "photoshops" when you have more "photoshops" as the volume increases the value decreases. Imagine if you can just tell claude "write me photoshop", go take a dump and come back 30 mins later to a running photoshop. You wouldn't now pay 200USD for a license, now would you? You'd pay 0USD.

If you now create a tool that can (or promises it) can obliterate the costs, it means essentially anyone can produce "photoshop". And when anyone can do it it will be done over and over and at which point they're worth zero and you can't give them away.

The same thing has happened to media publishing, print media -> web, computer games etc.

Then the problem is that when your product is worth zero you can no longer make a business by creating your product, so in order to survive you must look into alternative revenue streams such as ads, data mining etc. None of which are a benefit to to the product itself.

And what is left of journalism of low effort high volume clickbait garbage

Boy I can't wait for the equivalent of low effort high volume clickbait to take over software. Yay!

Whether you like it or not but the society is built on certain social constructs and agreements.

Do you think it's fair that when the society moves underneath, the capitalistic system moves its tectonic plates it's the individual who has to bear the cost of that?

Abd let's be clear only software devs are just sucking it up. You think lawyers and doctors would allow themselves to be laid off en masse and be replaced with trainees who just prompt the computer?

Also what will happen when high wage earners start loosing their discretionary income. The whole service sector for starters will be shaken.

Just imagine some big tech company laying off 10k engineers. Making 0.3m per year. That's 3b dollars that disappear from the incomes and thus from the economy and just stays in the pockets of the capital holders.

The query parameter issue is a pattern I see a lot. The model has thousands of examples of "how HTTP requests usually look" from its training process. When your input data conflicts with the pattern, the training data takes precedence.

Interestingly, the model doesn't "know" that it's ignoring you. From its perspective, it has retrieved a "meaningful" pattern—virtual parameter names that probably fit common conventions it saw during training. Your actual request simply... wasn't documented.

> LLMs have lowered the bar for the unskilled person to create shit software.

So? Demand the source code. Run your own AI to review the quality of the code base. The contracting company doesn't want to do it? Fine, find one that will.

Hm, why don't you just go do it then? Seems strange to spread this knowledge and create competition for yourself.

Theres a reason most people want a white collar job and send their kids to college instead of to such manual jobs.

Yup, absolutely! People before us already lived through the Great Depression, people already lived through two World Wars, and despite all that there were still some technological advancements made and some good opportunities amongst the chaos! There's obviously going to be pains from transitioning into a new world order, but humanity will still keep on living. Just don't expect the next world to be the same as before!

I think it's important to know and practice your passion, even if you have to work on something different to pay the bills. You can only be good at something if you really like it, and you never know what opportunity you'll stumble onto if you're ready for it.