In my experience, it's been the complete opposite. The very experienced engineers that are actually willing to use top of the line tooling are much better than they were before, including those that are over 40, and over 50.

Part of the practical degradation of traditional programmers over time has always been concentration and deep calculation, just like in chess. The old chess player knows chess much better than a 19 year old phenom, but they cannot calculate for that many hours at the same speed as before, so their experience eventually loses to the raw calculation. Maybe at 35, or at 45, but you are just not as good. Claude Code and Codex save you the computation, while every single instinct and 2 second "intuition", which is what you build with experience, is still online.

It's not just that it's a more fair competition: It's now unfair in the opposite direction. The senior that before could lead a team of 6 is now leading a team of agents, and reviewing their code just as before. Hell, it's easier to get the agent to change direction than most juniors around me, which will not be easy to correct with just plain, low-judgement feedback.

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bel8 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

But when a senior can do the job of 6 coworkers, what do you suppose will happen to the coworkers?

In farming, those who were replaced by tractors did not keep their jobs. What is different now?

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bluesnowmonkey 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

With farming, you couldn't just start your own farm, because it requires farmland, and there's only so much of that. But those 6 software engineers can start their own companies, fire up their own team of agents. There's no limit to how many companies can exist in the world.

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jhrmnn 29 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nothing, it’s that same story again. Industrialization turned peasants to blue collar workers by mechanizing agriculture. Then blue collar workers were turned to white collar workers by mechanizing all manual labor. Now AI is coming for white collar workers by mechanizing intellectual labor. The big question is what will white collar workers turn into.

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Schiendelman 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They build tractors, or sell tractors, or work in agricultural research and development...

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bel8 an hour ago | parent [-]

I highly doubt that a significant portion of farm labor became salesman or researchers. Builders? I could see that but robots already replaced a portion of those too.

	▲	kingleopold an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		less jobs creation is a almost certain for tech, but some people with high IQ get wayy more things done, they already do. This will spread to robots and other areas because robots are not automous yet, maybe will take decade(s). but meanwhile few operators will lead them in a more productive way? That's my bet. It's a clear, logical process with iterations. A lot of things are getting faster with AI, except energy production in some places in the world!
	▲	therepanic an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Well, if that's the case, then in your concept the issue isn't what will happen to the programmers, but rather to all the work in general.

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logicchains 21 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

>what do you suppose will happen to the coworkers?

They need to go into business for themselves, and become capital owners, who benefit from AI, not workers who are replaced by it. AI won't be able to compete at entrepreneurship unless robots are given autonomy and property rights like humans, which is quite unlikely to happen any time soon.

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QuercusMax 15 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

For me - I'm 43, and used to be an extremely productive Java/Swing developer after 15 years of experience, and I knew all my tools inside and out. But I no longer work at that company (which doesn't exist any more), and it takes me a lot longer to learn how to be effective with the new tools I'm using simply because I haven't had a decade to learn the ins and outs of the new environments I'm working with.

So AI saves me immense amounts of time figuring out how to write proper syntax, remembering the ins and outs of unit testing frameworks, etc. If I stick around for a year or three I'm sure I'll get much much faster and learn these tools better.