If programmers play it right that'll be us working less and delivering the same results. Who said everything has to benefit the capital class?

Speaking as a programmer, the net effect so far is that we work more and deliver far more results and get paid the same or less.

And I run my own firm... but I have to compete against a global market of other programmers using similar tools who are also trying to compete on price, and then there are hordes of new entrants who can vibe-code things that superficially look like they'll meet a customer's needs and are better at marketing than I am, so my area of business gets constrained to just customers who need help after the problems with the vibe-coded solution appear, the vendor who made it is long gone, and they already spent an inordinate amount of money on the vibe-coded solution since they thought it was complete and it looked pretty good.

Most of my past roles had very simple code at the important deliverable level, on bizarre and arcane platforms that would have little context for frontier LLMs. Most the creativity and complexity was in tooling for research/development/testing.

Agentic coding could help a lot for the latter, not necessarily the former.

Programmer work product (typically) benefits the capital class, directly via product engineering or indirectly via platform engineering.

If the aspiration of a 10x or more programmer is enabled through AI then the capital class win, in the typical case. Software eats the world.

What's the play for software engineers that lands them in a better place but doesn't leave money on the table for the capitalists?