You need gatekeepers, planers and people talking to other people in businesses. Not _all_ of those will be replaced by AI. However, it is really not that unlikely that seasoned senior developers - like, f.i. me - actually _will_ be out of a job in 18 months. I've been mentally and emotionally preparing for this possiblity since early last year.

What I find very interesting to experience and hadn't consciously anticipated was the speed of transition. In hindsight it's perfectly logical, but I wasn't ready for this. When a bot closes in on your coding skills and surpases them it's not that your salary goes down a bit or you shift your focus-area a little bit. No. You're out of an effing job. Like, basically instantaniously. Society might not notice right away and you might have a few months or perhaps a year do prepare for the inevitable, but your job will just dissolve into a pink cloud of logic. Quite literally actually.

What's also interesting is that the world won't really care if us IT nerds lose our lofty throne. We are one in a few hundred or perhaps even thousands. Nobody cares. The real party starts when the robots come and take regular peoples jobs. That's what I'm really scared about.

When an AI can do everything a human software engineer can do, it will be able to do anything a human can do.

Doing what a human software engineer can do requires knowledge of real life, the ability to learn new things like a human does, the ability to see the big picture based on living a real life.

Wrong. The best code and progging AI will never dance Tango as good as I do. It doesn't have a body. It also won't have my priorities and motivations.

_But_ it is very close that it will be better at progging than I or any other human ever could ever be. I already experience AI helping me out daily on a scale that is just about beyond any single humans knowability. Which shouldn't be much of a surprise. I or any other human can only take one course for an API at a time and learning it properly takes me weeks or months. An AI can do the same but with tens or hundreds of APIs at a time and learn everything there is to know about those in minutes or hours. It can also learn from mistakes and experiences of any other AI within seconds. And if can test new assumptions within seconds as well.

If you look at the current pace of AI, LLMs, ML bots or whatever you want to call them and still think that AI will not coding circles around entire teams of seasoned professional developers any time soon, your being silly or are (blissfully?) unaware of what's happening right now. Especially since AI is already doing that in quite a few places.

Prepare for incoming. And believe me, that's what you want to do.

Disclaimer: European here.

I do like quite a few of those EU regulations. Many make sense and are anti trust and consumer/citizen friendly. How do you like the new USB ports on iPhones? You're welcome. EU GDPR? Good stuff. Toxic food additives banned? I sure do effing hope so. Etc.

However, this is one of those things that make no sense and is nothing other than micromanagement by the clueless. However I build my website is my business and my business alone (hidden cross domain tracking and similar dirty tricks excluded). If the user doesn't like infinite scrolling, they shouldn't use it. Nobody is forcing them. It's that simple. This inane nonsense is what frustrates people about the EU. They should keep that short of rubbish to an absolute minimum.

... AI assistant stuff. Junie (their own offering), Claude, Codex, etc. optional and selectable via a drop-down in the AI chat window. I've got an IDE subscription and haven't updated to paid AI yet but so far I didn't need to either.

A field of solar cells with not a single moving part is way easier and cheaper to maintain than an entire supply chain for fossil fuel.

If we would start again from scratch with cars today, nobody would touch an ICE with a ten foot pole. They only are still produced, because the entire fossil fuel infrastructure still is in place. Once that is over, ICEs will be stuff out of a museum, like steam engines today.

Because I couldn't find the tracks on youtube and still had some space in my CD shelf. And they were cheap and had a bit of nostalgia going on at that moment. I wouldn't go back from files to CDs, but they are a digital format and thus not totally from the steam age like vinyl or other stuff which can justify to keep them around if you have the room. My last _new_ CD is at least a decade back, probably longer. And I'm pretty sure that's not going to change.

... than yet another glorified and way overrated IRC/XChat clone like Slack or other candidates - will only take me a few minutes. As soon as they get more annoying than convenient I'm out. For all I care they might as well just go broke already, since they're still not profitable. No need to try to gain any mass by starting this uber-surveillance thing. It won't pan out anyway, so they might aswell just give up.

Disclaimer: former US American citizen turned European here

The system and culture in the US is pretty broken in key parts, that's for sure. Europe is aging and has a demographic bomb coming up, but by and large quality of living is higher by default these days. Healthcare, safety nets and a (somewhat) sane system of taxation are all part of this. I hope any US revolution that might be upcoming will be peaceful and that some basics will be factory-reset to some saner defaults.

... Chillout time. No joke. My productivity has gone 5x in the last 6 months, especially with the newest models and them spitting out boring but maintainable boilerplate code for me and explaining the details of what they're doing, but overall my life has become more chill. I've started taking naps at noon when I'm in homeoffice.

Then again, I'm an experienced senior webdev, the new product we're building has is architecture 100% designed and maintained by me alone and with AI I basically have a team 5 juniors around me doing the gruntwork at a whim, just as I have 8-10 API and PL experts in one single chat ready to answer highly specialized questions on some detail of the app I'm building.

Projecting this 3 years out I am sooooo out of a job. But I'm just a websoft nerd no one cares about. Just wait until the bots start driving cars and trucks, doing delivery and cleaning. That's when the real party starts.

We are certainly not prepared for what is coming for society as a whole. I myself am trying to enjoy the ride as much as I can. Couldn't say that I mind robots doing my work, as long as I get some sort of cut from the productivity gains, even if that means chasing software-bots around most of the day for -20k of my last salary, as is the state of things right now.

... northern Europe and the northern Atlantic in the unique position of becoming the earths new coldest point on earth. Iceland would be affected, as would Scandinavia, Germany and some other regions. Given that Germany enjoys a relatively moderate climate considering its latitude position on the globe these assumptions are plausible. If the gulf stream goes away, Germany will get colder.

As mentioned, that is pretty unique, globally speaking.

EOM

Not burning fossil fuel causes less air polution than burning fossil fuel? How amazing. ...
Is this some kind of premature April fools thing?

... understood FOSS from day one and wouldn't touch anything proprietary for anything mission-critical with a ten-foot pole ever since. All the setups I've built in the last 25 years won't even miss a beat when the entire SaaS landscape finally turns into the nuclear wasteland it was always destined to be.

I will enjoy the fireworks though, thank you for those. Getting the popcorn ready as we speak.

I'm smack center in the Gen X demographic and am not too worried about ageism, since the demographic decline is going to be in full swing once I close in on retirement age and we're then likely going to need every able body to pitch in. ... AI and robots actually have me more concerned, given the current situation.

... are done and over. Anyone not sleeping under a rock is aware of this. Novelists are among those bound to be replaced by AI.

Point in case:

Two years ago I had a longer talk with Germanys most prolific fantasy author, Bernard Hennen. I've known him for a while since I used to live in his home town and we bump into each other at various German fantasy and RPG conventions. Anyway, it was in that discussion that he noted that he's mentally preparing for AI to basically take his job and he back then already was getting ready to fall back to world building, self-publishing - his current publisher is only a shell of its former self and used to be one of the largest and most successful in Germany - and live events.

As I said, that was two years ago. We all know how things habe progressed since then. And still are.