And the invention of AGI will have the same impact as the electricity, i mean, they're both inventions, right ? I can't wait for all these billions of new full time jobs coming to replace the current ones.

Farmers couldn't be replaced by low skill labor because they are low skill.

Farmer didn't stop existing, but we went from 80% of the population farming is to 1-10%. If farming automation had happened in 1800 when 80% of the workforce was working in agriculture, it'd have been a cataclysm.

I'm pretty sure there is a slight widespread lack of respect for software engineers, mainly offset by their high salaries. Wait and see once vibecoding becomes the new norm.

And for software engineers, yeah, automation will wreck their jobs and their paychecks because software engineering's higher speed limit in efficiency is the speed of light, not a tractor's.

Great points. Besides if one look around even today beyond people who somehow still succeeding at software hustle, there are already tons of people fallen off IT gravy train. A lot of manual testers who would make decent living are now eliminated by automation. Software document writers jobs are kind of gone. Developers are supposed to create document themselves on Confluent wiki etc. A lot of prized SAP consultants and such from past are now downgraded to generic mid level project managers / IT managers if they were hold onto IT jobs at all.

I can list lot more jobs e.g exchange admins, app server admins, DBAs, they are either gone or far fewer available. And lot of people were not able to up-skill and fell out of race in just a matter of 15-20 years.

There are two ways to think about your work in IT, one is as a person who really understands how to use a particular technology, and the other is as someone who can figure out how to use technology in general to achieve some particular end. Anybody who picks the first path might have a very well paid career for the few years that that technology is relevant, but will eventually crash out. You need to always be looking at the next thing and keeping your skills and knowledge up to date. Nobody ever guaranteed that Microsoft Outlook admins would have a career for life.

I am talking about aggregate distribution not individual motivation to do better. Of course some can do better, learn new things, update LinkedIn profile regularly, attend local networking events, take paid membership to enhance visibility in job search and so on.

The point is more and more people who survived with average skills or one time learning in past are not able to do so now. And it is not a complain about anything or anyone but observation that few people are seeing marked improvement in their lives with changing technology and many more are seeing degradation due to same changes.

I feel like this begs for a careful analysis, we could probably drop a dozen more reasons as to why demand in devs and perhaps even in # of lines of code might plateau or decline in the near future, without even mentioning AI at any point.

I totally agree that there are whole host of reasons for this. One of them I think is plainly a ton of work which was novel and custom in past is now subsumed in base infrastructure of today's world. Despite big tech and other vendor keep pushing of new things lot of people and companies are finding base level acceptable for many tasks which would need custom work in past. So no growing demand custom software for everything.

We can already see for example as per Ericsson report[1] after exponential demand for mobile data and speed it is now plateauing and next decade will not see huge growth. As users are finding things they do and apps they use with phones are now fast/good enough.

1. https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/mobility-repo...

>I'm pretty sure there is a slight widespread lack of respect for software engineers

I get the opposite impression. If anything software developers get more respect than they deserve.

Your point is about as good as saying that "Is my life worse off at home since I can clean whole area in 30 min of mild effort with my cordless vacuum cleaner where as manual broom would've taken me at half day of hard work?"

Of course my life is bit better as I saved few hours on weekend as owner of house and a vacuum cleaner.

But my life as worker is worse in last 10 years as knowledge of developing large complex applications is not valuable because we are in Next Gen Cloud native era where one application will not contain more than 5 functions anyway. Even if I claim I can write better maintainable, performance code , the employer directly or indirectly says "Well we don't care, we need you to complete these 10 JIRAs in this sprint" And only answer they take from me is yes.

> Farmers today are not respected / valued for their work?

Pretty much most of them feel underpaid for the amount of hard work and I hear they're having problem recruiting younger people to the business, so many foreigners take those jobs.