You're standing on the shore, and your clients are having fun in the water. The tide is going up, and you're screaming at your clients "come back! it's not safe". And so, they show you the face. You appear to them like the boring guy who's not fun to hang out with. Eventually the tide is high, there is strong current, and they are being swept away further and further from the shore and they are panicking : "pyeri! help us! please!"

People (the non tech people, the MBA people) don't want to hear what you, the tech guy has to say. You're the not fun guy. Stay in touch until they do need you and say : you were right. That's the day you charge them a dear price for the service.

AI is still at the bait stage of rollout. They subsidize it, they want you to get hooked onto it to the point where you cannot do without it. Then only, they start to charge. I used google code assist for around 9 months. It was free. I would ask it questions from time to time, to help to fix bugs, and to avoid to spend an hour browsing SO. Now, it's around $30 per month. They are losing too much too fast atm, they have reached the stage where they have to start to charge. Another one of their strategies is : IPO. Once they (openai/anthropic) are listed on the nasdaq, you will pay whether you want it or not (via your exposure to the nasdaq/S&p500 with your etfs).

Look, the job of a medicine doctor, or a plane pilot, have largely been automated. The doctor could rely on google searches, or even AI, to answer your questions. The pilot can trust the auto pilot. Yet, the doctor who does advanced stuff (surgery) has no shortcut to mastering his skill : he still has to go through 10 years of studies + years of experience under the supervision of a senior with 20y of XP. Similar path for the plane pilot.

And the same reasoning applies to the SWE. AI allows to : delegate the repetitive tasks, generate the boilerplate code, fix time consuming bugs, to focus on more meaningful stuff.

AI is a tool. It's an additional layer of abstraction. The winners will be the guys who are passionate, who still put efforts to master SW, who still put efforts to remain up to date with the regular updates (new releases, new libraries, new approaches...), and who understand how to use AI the right way.

All those guys who 100% rely on AI do is help big tech cover their massive costs for the deployment of AI infrastructures. Big tech does need those guys.

Imagine the auto pilot fails for some reason, during a flight. There are 400 passengers behind. This is a minor issue for the trained and experienced pilot.

What do you do, as a SWE, when tomorrow, anthropic/google/whoever, tells you : "we can't keep running at a loss, our prices for AI have to reflect our costs. Your monthly subscription for Claude is now $500/month". Or there is a power shortage and for a couple of days you cannot rely on AI, you can only rely on your brain to deliver this feature you committed to deliver tomorrow ?