Tech people had a really good thing going for a lot of years. It peaked right after COVID when it seemed like anyone could get a job and a raise in tech by doing some interview practice and learning how to say the right things. Things even started getting weird for a while when this combined with remote work and being overemployed (multiple remote jobs) entered the common vernacular, even if it wasn’t common. When I interacted with college student software devs doing resume reviews and interview prep it was crazy how many had plans based on trends like getting a FAANG job to FIRE in 10 years, using a VPN to do a remote job while they secretly traveled the world, or doing overemployment with 3 jobs. Everyone had this idea that tech was the place to be for an easy job with low demands and high pay.

Only a few years later the situation has completely reversed. Even veteran developers are angry that the talents they’ve been building for years have become a little less unique almost overnight. I believe there is still a lot of value to experienced human developers, but there’s no denying that the barrier to entry has fallen significantly.

It’s natural to be frustrated with this sudden change. None of likes when our industries start changing in ways that reduce our leverage.

What’s unhealthy is reacting with denial or a belief that you’re going to stop the future by resisting it. There are a lot of anti-AI writings that reach the front page every week, but nearly all of them come from writers who pride themselves on not using AI. One of the highly upvoted posts yesterday was from someone who had only used a little AI in a free trial of a tool some time ago, but they were talking authoritatively as if they were an expert on these tools. These writers are just not good sources for anything other than feeding denial about the future.

Developers are a TINY percentage of the population (< 1%). The anti-AI sentiment is coming from the other 99%.

> but there’s no denying that the barrier to entry has fallen significantly.

The barrier to entry to make slop is lower, but it's gotten much higher for developing the skill of programming. There was already an issue with a lack of mentorship and path for juniors when agile attempted to turn software engineers into assembly line workers, among other issues with the industry becoming hyper short-term focused.

Now you have educational barriers where students are competing with other students that are cheating with LLMs. There are psychological barriers with learned helplessness. The 100k lines of vibecoded slop produced hits a wall but they've gained no understanding of the code in the process or ability to make changes themselves. At the first job juniors and interns get they're being told not to take the time to learn and understand the problem they're working and instead they need to hit the LLM slot machine or risk getting fired.

> Even veteran developers are angry that the talents they’ve been building for years have become a little less unique almost overnight. I believe there is still a lot of value to experienced human developers, but there’s no denying that the barrier to entry has fallen significantly

The barrier to entry was always low. You only need a book and a computing device that allows to run code you’ve edited. The rest is just technical skills, theoretical knowledge and practical experience (gained over time). What was always hard is systematic problem solving, which is a mindset thing. And LLM can’t help you there.

I don’t consider my talents unique. My only value as a developer was always problem solving. Anything else has been automated for ages.