People will still be needed to translate the instructions from upper management, i.e. "make it better, now" or "make the red thing do what the blue thing does" most of which are never going to be parsable with any kind of AI, so humans will form the abstraction layer even if they're writing less of the code.

What struck me yesterday was a post about a "$10,000 ChatGPT error" at a startup, where clearly the young devs had "got ChatGPT to do it" and refactor a load of stuff because the code was then in Python of some flavour, which I read between the lines and figured was likely the only coding they knew about from a bootcamp. But then there was a terrible error in the GPT-generated code which caused loads of hassle because nobody caught it, because nobody was really even reading the code upon which the company depended, because who cares, ChatGPT is doing everything now. So it did make me concerned that tech startups are going to shift from being funded with lazy ideas or marketese to being funded with the lazy ideas and marketese of people who cannot even code at all.

Hence it's a step closer towards idiocracy as much as it is our glowing AI future, when Silicon Valley produces neither silicon nor even software, because once the young generation can go "just get the AI to do it" nobody is going to spend time keeping their mental tools sharp by actually coding all day long. Understanding coding could become a rarer and rarer skill in some ways, so today's coders will be the dark wizards of a decade's time.

Also I don't think LLM's will ever reach the point where they can code deeply enough because a large amount of majorly complex material and massive projects are not in publicly accessible repositories. And what I mean too is that I think for all the hype, continuing quantum leaps in AI, and human-coded-at-great-pain quantum leaps in AI are still needed. I don't think that simply throwing more GPUs at the problem is going to keep delivering spectacular returns, rather, diminishing returns, and things might flatten out for a while. I don't think there's going to be some "cascade of free lunch" and AIs will improve themselves on their own, at least not in the immediate future. And that is also a recipe for a mess and chaos.

A good thing to do is to focus on doing what you really love, try reducing your social following closer to zero, and not buy into the hype so much. The AI-pocalypse could still be a long way off and there's no need to worry yourself all the way there. Humans want humans. If an AI could generate me perfect "new" Bob Dylan or Beatles songs, then they'd be interesting for 30 seconds and I'd go back to the real thing. An undead, disembodied AI therapist is also not going to replace an actual flesh-and-blood empathetic therapist any time soon. Much of what we find most profound and valuable does not reduce down to language, which is where AI first took a mis-step, right at the very idea of the Turing test. It's been stuck with that confusion ever since, by people who believe it without thinking philosophically – it reduces us to the only board that AI can ever win on, whereas we have so many more games. Including the "ignoring it because it's an AI" game.

One of the main things capitalism does for us is keep us busy all day. AI automation isn't going to remove this key feature of capitalism.