But the remote jobs are the canary in the coal mine.
Return to office (or tacking on an in person requirement to a posting) is just one sign that the market has shifted in favor of capital and away from labor. That's driven by AI reducing the value of developers.
And the free-will-is-an-illusion camp would have you continue to trace that back from why was the act of delegation made (probablistic) to the big bang. Implying that humans can also not make decisions.
Why do you think there will be a human in the loop on any of these tasks, and why do you think that you will be that human?
I've watched the robots become better/faster software developers than I ever was over the last year. I've got a lifetime of esoteric knowledge that's completely obsolete now. I can ask robots to do things, but so can any other random person.
What, exactly, do you think we are going to be prompting these things to do? And why would anybody pay us to do that, rather than just prompt them directly?
The difficulty with building software has mostly never been the code itself, but how to tease out what to actually build and how to connect system components together in a sane way that meets business requirements.
It is indeed neat that LLMs with fancy agent harnesses can write code very well at this point, but that doesn’t mean the average person can think through problems in the way that is required to build software that operates at meaningful scale with complex trade-offs and architecture decisions to be made. In my experience with others in other fields, that is not a common skill, and I really don’t see how an LLM is going to solve that.
For this reason, I do not see software engineering going anywhere, but I do believe it is possible/likely there will be negative changes in hiring and wages.
> I feel like the thing a lot of people are missing about the AI explosion is that there will be new opportunities that didn't exist before.
This feels like cope to me. So much of what "knowledge workers" do at all falls into a few buckets: we shuffle data around, we serve ads, or we provide tooling for those who do those things.
When the car came, the buggy drivers were screwed, but there were ultimately more cars (and hence work for people who supported them) than there could ever have been buggies.
What does AI give us "more" of, exactly? It makes everything simpler, and thus requiring fewer "knowledge workers" to plumb things in. After all, the need to shuffle data around is finite.
Android actually does have a desktop mode when you connect an external display. I'm not sure how much this is standardized / merged into AOSP, but I use it with my stock Pixel 10 Pro.
I would describe the experience as... passable. Historically it was quite glitchy but recent OS updates have improved it. The biggest issues resolve around apps which do not scale their UIs correctly.
Why would you build an app at all? Why wouldn't Claude just be the app itself? You ask it to set up your UI in the web app and you just use Claude for your entire workflow.
We're only a few persistent widgets and a better persistent storage story away from this possibility.
This is kind of like Alan Kay's idea in the 70s/80s for the Smalltalk image being the software that users customize to their needs instead of buying the software, except now it's a chatbot/agent interface instead of a customizable, integrated Smalltalk IDE.
This used to be true during the zero interest rate days when you could leapfrog up the chain but I think the times have changed.
By all means keep your eyes open outside of your org, but it's increasingly hard to even get a resume seen by a human on the other side of the hiring process.
If you have a good reputation on your current team, that places you above external candidates as you look to move up in your organization. Don't ignore that.
TLDR: awareness of the SV "rationalist" polycule has breached containment and normies are reading about it now. [0]
Maybe a "better" source is the NY Post article [1]. The information itself isn't really news - it's even largely available on wikipedia [2] [3] - but the fact that it's hitting mainstream-adjacent news outlets is novel.
Return to office (or tacking on an in person requirement to a posting) is just one sign that the market has shifted in favor of capital and away from labor. That's driven by AI reducing the value of developers.
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