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pear01 an hour ago

Let's also not forget a lot of the market edge of SWEs comes in knowing how to navigate these parts. The fact you needed to be reasonably fluent in a language was already a barrier to entry which meant in better times new grads could earn six figures at their first job just for putting in that effort.

Maybe you will still be needed. That is one question. How well you will be paid and treated when the barrier to entry is now "I can think" is another. As the parent indicates, most people doing software are not doing things akin to pure math. I don't think most SWEs want that lifestyle anyway.

It's ok. You shouldn't fight the coming change. Instead use the time we still have to fight for more equal outcomes (vote for politicians that support UBI, Medicare for all). The longer you delude yourself that you are uniquely needed in an increasingly mechanized world the worse all our outcomes will be.

arandomhuman 20 minutes ago | parent [-]

The barrier to entry to generating code may be "I can think", but the barrier to entry for solving hard, distributed/multi-faceted engineering problems still remains quite high - agents can't really do this still to a decent level of efficacy reliably.

The progress models have made in the last 5 years aren't convincing me they'll bridge that gap too soon, although I can see how some people are convinced by how decent agentic harnesses make things. I know it's really easy to get very hyped with the current state of the technology, but try to have a bit of skepticism.