Laurie Voss supplies the more bullish half of today’s argument:
The cost of writing code collapsed, and the cost of reviewing, fixing and operating it is following.
I’m more bullish than Kruer about much of engineering. A lot of it is “just wait for the tooling”: deploys, operations, and maintenance are not obviously structural limits on model capability. Product judgment is different: someone still has to decide what is worth making and what “good” means.
Then Jevons does his usual trick. Make software radically cheaper and we will demand radically more of it: the bad dentist website, the school spreadsheet, the government process held together by email. The job moves toward product engineering, but the industry’s aggregate shape may change less than expected—plenty of well-paid people making far more software, while spending much less time typing it.