Right, whats happening here is the first sales pitch to CEOs: "AI will let you fire everyone" is not panning out (duh)... so for the next trick, "AI will at least let you pay them less" is a natural pivot. Both are absurd. Just let the hypecycle die off in peace already.

We've seen this play out in history multiple times, already, so it's pretty ignorant to ignore the evidence.

Carpenters aren't being paid less because we have framing nailguns and pre-fabricated trusses. Instead their skillset had to evolve. In fact, smaller crews can do larger projects... which doesn't mean fire your crewmembers, it means a builder company can take on more projects in parallel, leading to bigger profits through volume.

"AI"s are useful tools. The skills in a post-AI world are different. Lower wages will be experienced by people that can't evolve, that's all.

> Just let the hypecycle die off in peace already.

I so wish that would happen so we can all find a more sustainable middle ground, but the trillion or so dumped into it says otherwise.

AI is no longer the nail gun, that was auto complete with gpt 3.5. now it's like you say: "Build me a new roof" and an hour later it has materialized somehow. Not sure many carpenters would survive this.

it's not really comparable IMO

Eventually AI will be able to just bootstrap solid security, payment, accounts, DB management, backups, customer support services that automatically link to the correct department or sub-system

I think the environment and landscape will change and different skills will be more valuable for developers

But I think the existing skill-sets developers use can mostly be automated away

If you were really good at your job as a contract software engineer in the past, you would basically just automate yourself out of a job and have to find a new one anyway. This just accelerates it.

[dead]