Would be interesting to see how this affects the service companies.

Typically for a project you’d have something like 1 senior, 1-2 mid and 2-3 juniors and sell the team to the client.

The junior/mid is where the margins are, as seniors knew their value and commanded a bigger salary with little margin for profit, but juniors aren’t paid as much, yet you can still comfortably bill the client.

Nowadays it’s 1-2 seniors for the whole thing and the service company is expected to pay for the tokens the seniors use to replace the lucrative juniors, so it’s a double hit for the company.

For the past couple months I've been "managing" Codex to do plenty of grunt work. Granted I'm not one to produce thousands of lines per month(systems engineer, mostly bug fixing and extending a large library which sits on top of proprietary HW), but I think my SOTA model use for the period is under $200. Getting a jr to do the work would have been more frustrating and cost 100x more. Sure, it would have been in society's interests to train a junior dev, I'm not arguing against external benefits to it. But damn, I am now convinced coding is going away as a skill and certainly in 5 years I will never deal with code directly ever again. Oh and I've learned, or relearned, a lot while working with LLMs. I am a better engineer now than I was a few months ago.