It sorta feels to me like extrapolating from "the internet has all the knowledge for free" to "we won't need tradespeople anymore"

Why hire a plumber when you can just watch some youtube videos and do it yourself?

Why pay someone else for their software when you can just make your own?

Because the hard part of making software wasn't *just* writing the code. It was about understanding the problem well enough to understand what the solution should look like.

I feel like as software engineers we should be pretty familiar with what it's like talking to your average user, they will sometimes understand the root cause of what's making their task difficult (although often will get focused on some annoying but ultimately trivial symptom) and have very disasterously bad ideas on how to solve it.

What we've given them with generative AI is a machine they can put their sometimes ok, sometimes questionable understanding of the problem and their dreadful solutions and it will happily churn away building it regardless of how pointless and silly it is.

A future where every user can tell the AI "We keep getting the sales tax wrong, remove charging sales tax from the checkout flow" isn't one I'm terrifically worried about.

In the same way that having access to information about plumbing didn't suddenly make everyone plumbers, having access to a machine that will implement every idea you have regardless of quality doesn't suddenly make everyone a software engineer.