There are still people who dictate their emails to a secretary.

Technology changes, people often don't.

Programmers will be around for a longer time than anyone realises because most people don't understand how the magic box works let alone the arcane magics that run on it.

Sure and there are still people who take a horse and buggy into town, but we are well past Peak Horse.

A closer analogy would be scribes and the printing press.

Except it doesn’t fit. For a while now we’ve had access to basically all the knowledge in the world and most people don’t use it.

Why would people make the effort to build a website using AI when they didn’t do so with any of the existing no-code options available.

They won’t.

Will dev be exactly the same in 10 years time? No.

Will there be more devs than there are now? 100%

Will experienced devs make bank? Yes.

Exactly. I know I’ll still be programming in 5 years. What I don’t know is whether anybody will be paying me.

"We can remove your programmers valued at millions per month for $100/month secure cloud agents"

Pretty easy sell.

Yes, it is an easy sell. But when that happens this sentence will also be viable - "We can remove the need for your company, valued at multiple millions a month" ... because after all, PMs and CEOs aren't harder to replace than programmers at that point.

Crazy how well that’s been working

The technology isn't there yet.

All signs point to it rapidly progressing towards this inflection.

Current agents are insanely good, every decent programmer using them knows this.

> The technology isn't there yet. Yes

> All signs point to it rapidly progressing towards this inflection. Not really

> Current agents are insanely good, every decent programmer using them knows this. Also not really

If you find them "insanely good" you were likely doing work that was already very repetitive or broadly implemented by others.

They have their uses, but it isn't as pervasive as people believe.

Used both, they're great for boilerplate. Anything more they breakdown.

Okay well I and many other experienced engineers disagree so the only remaining conclusion is that you're misusing the technology.

Argumentum ad populum. What kind of experience to those engineers? That matters. Another possible conclusion is that the parent was talking about use cases that are not simple web apps or marketing pages but real issues in large software.

Again you're taking your own circumstance or even patent inability and extending that to the entire technology.

You've set yourself up such that all I need to do is go "I'm developing complex veterinary software including integrations with laboratory equipment" and you're completely falsified. Why expose yourself like this instead of being intellectually humble?

You're the one who has extended their limited experience to all of software engineering.

The only reason that anyone has engaged with you here is because you're being intellectually arrogant.

Yes, exactly this.

Most of my day job is not about bashing out nextjs websites. In fact if I did that one day a year it would be a lot.

You could assign me a task from your job and I could trivially complete it using agents. However, I will charge consulting rates.

This degree of ignorance is why we don't let consultants near the actually important stuff.

What breaks down is developer patience faced with a new paradigm.