> People fear that programming is dead.

> People stop learning programming.

> Programmers become scarce.

> Programmers become valuable again.

Maybe it's wishful thinking but I'm not going to be surprised if it plays out like this. In some sense the reverse happened over the last couple of decades - everyone and their mother got into IT and the industry became saturated.

Maybe, another possibility is the frontier providers change their pricing terms to try to capture more of the value once a sufficient number of people’s skills have atrophied. For example: 20% of the revenue of all products built with $AI_SERVICE. For someone several years out of practice they may have no other option.

It's hard to say if there's anything new under the Sun...

There were always unqualified people coming out of college, but the amount of people in interviews that can literally do nothing these days seems higher than before.

There was always some cohort of people that somehow managed to graduate from college with a CS degree, and seemingly not learning anything, or at least not learn how to even write basic code (independently).

It seems like AI is not reducing that percentage - possibly increasing it.

Anecdata, take it with a grain of salt.

I think this happened with airline pilots and they're experiencing a boom now

Essentially what happened after .com bust. For years CS departments had to sell themselves and convince people there was a future in computers.

Not that AI is the same as Websites all going broke. But no one can see the future and it’s unlikely that deep technical knowledge will be obsolete.

Software became ubiquitous because a huge majority of the population found utility and enjoyment from what software had to offer. Very quickly that number in the population is dwindling. (Good) software can only thrive in an environment where other sectors are also thriving. Who needs 99.999% uptime when your family is starving and freezing.

Assuming the AI maximalist digital god bros are wrong, there will always be some demand for programmers, the question is how much. It's not hard to see a future where programming goes the way of farming where the demand for small-scale farming still exists but at a tiny fraction of what it once was.