Totally get that; I'm on the older side, so personally I've been down this road quite a few times. We're ALWAYS on the verge of our profession being rugged somehow. RAD tools, Outsourcing, In-sourcing, No-Code, AI/LLM... I used to be curious about why there was overwhelming pressure to eliminate "us", but gave up and just focus on doing good work.

The pressure is simple - money. Competent people are rare and we're not cheap. But it turns out, those cheaper less competent people can't replace us, no matter what tools you give them - there is fundamental complexity to the work we do which they can't handle.

However, I think this time is qualitatively different. This time the rich people who wanna get rid of us are not trying to replace us with other people. This time, they are trying to simulate _us_ using machines. To make "us" faster, cheaper and scalable.

I don't think LLMs will lead to actual AI and their benefit is debatable. But so much money is going into the research that somebody might just manage to build actual AI and then what?

Hopefully, in 10 years we'll all be laughing at how a bunch of billionaires went bankrupt by trying to convince the world that autocomplete was AI. But if not, a whole bunch of people will be competing for a much smaller pool of jobs, making us all much, much poorer, while they will capture all the value that would have normally been produced by us right into their pockets.

I agree; I wasn't clear in my previous post. I understand the economic underpinnings. I cannot understand the coupled animus and have stopped trying.