8/14/26
There’s a popular little pithy saying right now along the lines of “AI won’t take your job, but someone who uses AI will”. I think it is generally used by boosters to sort of smugly suggest using AI is the Right Thing and using their cool new tools they’ll outperform you.
Recently, I read this demoralizing article about the industrialization of software engineering:
This article gave me a different lens to understand LLM code tools. I’ve been feeling recently like they don’t really speed me up when I’ve tried them. There are exceptions, but in general I don’t really think they are meaningfully speeding up my coworkers or my company’s output.
But, I do think that even without any speed gains, if they manage to deskill the work software engineers that will be a win for management. If it no longer takes 4 years of computer science (which it already does not) to build software engineers can be paid less. If you don’t need to know data structures to QA a feature an LLM spit out, we can be paid less. If I’m mostly just feeding JIRA tickets into an LLM and QAing its output, I’ll be paid less. I’ll have worse work conditions. We’ll have less bargaining power.
The AI-powered engineer doesn’t actually need to be better than me to replace me. They just need to be cheaper and less empowered by their company and tooling.