most swes don't work in jobs where they only work on bounded measurable tasks. there will probably be more "engineers" than ever

Given that we can keep making infinite abstractions with software if we actually saturate software demand with AI then I don't see why every other industry is cooked (robotics is downstream of software).

building agents is just a completely different ballgame, theres a lot of infra and harness engineering around handling the nondeterministic behaviors that are nonobvious unless you've shipped agents at scale

The more senior the candidate the less they took advantage of the tools. Most commonly they would manually copy/paste error or syntax errors and then run out of time. One candidate only copy pasted his questions into google and used the AI overview

Junior candidates tended to be overly ai eager, a lot of them oneshotted the problem but were unable to explain any of the details

That being said I think 80% of the skills should come easily to a capable dev that is willing to put in the effort to learn and get used to managing agents. Building agents that perform work themselves is a lot harder (and still pretty unsolved)

- directing the model and knowing when its going off the rails

- verification

- setting up the right loops, harness, graphs around the models

economics still apply to hiring people. if all your competitors are using ai and there's market share to fight over and people still are a productivity positive vs. only ai, hiring will increase as we've seen recently with swes

heaps of people on this site expect them to be omnipotent then claim it’s fake when it doesn’t read minds

textiles had jevons paradox, and many more textile workers were employed even when textile machines were being created, until we saturated the demand for cheap clothing in the world and then textile workers were kaput (same for farming, and horses)

software is currently undergoing jevons paradox, but it's very unknown how high the ceiling of demand for software is. web dev might be doomed, but software in general i think is probably limitless

Intelligence is also probably unbounded (atm software and intelligence are very closely tied together). its very possible token spend rides up the curve forever.

it seems very implementation dependant, I know a startup with incredibly realistic voice agents that most people don’t detect is an ai that outperforms humans. But ai for CX seems like an easy project to do for companies looking to cut costs so the average agent a user encounters in the wild is poor quality

very nontrivial problem knowing when to stop and making assumptions

it was great for workers around the world who now can afford clothes