I think perhaps for some folks we're looking at their first professional paradigm shift. If you're a bit older, you've seen (smaller versions of) the same thing happening before as e.g. the Internet gained traction, Web2.0, ecommerce, crypto, etc. and have seen your past skillset become useless as now it can be accomplished for only $10/mo/user.... either you pivot and move on somehow, or you become a curmudgeon. Truly, the latter is optional, and at any point when you find yourself doing that you wish to stop and just embrace the new thing, you're still more than welcome to do so. AI is only going to get EASIER to get involved with, not harder.

And by the same token (ha) for some folks we're looking at their first hype wave. If you're a bit older, you've seen similar things like 4GLs and visual programming languages and blockchain and expert systems. They each left their mark on our profession but most of their promises were unfounded and ultimately unrealized.

I like a lot of 4GL ideas. Closest I've come was working on ServiceNow which is sort of a really powerful system with ugly, ugly roots but the idea of your code being the database being the code really resonated with me, as a self-taught programmer.

Similarly, Lisp's homoiconicity makes sense to me as a wonderfully aesthetic idea. I remember generating strings-of-text that were code, but still just text, and wishing that I could trivially step into the structure there like it was a map/dict... without realizing that that's what an AST is and what the language compiler / runtime is already always doing.

Lol. In a few years when the world is awash in AI-generated slop [1] my "past skills" will not only be relevant, they will be actively sought after.

[1] Like the recent "Gas Town" and "Beads" that people keep mentioning in the comments that require extensive scripts/human intervention to purge from the system: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46510121

I'm probably the same age as you, and similarly counting on past skills - it's what lets me use AI to produce things that aren't slop.

> The vast majority of coders in employment barely write anything more complex than basic CRUD apps. These jobs were always going to be automated or abstracted away sooner or later.

My experience has been negative progress in this field. On iOS, UIKit in Interface Builder is an order of magnitude faster to write and to debug, with less weird edge cases, than SwiftUI was last summer. I say last summer because I've been less and less interested in iOS the more I learn about liquid glass, even ignoring the whole "aaaaaaa" factor of "has AI made front end irrelevant anyway?" and "can someone please suggest something the AI really can't do so I can get a job in that?"

The 80s TUI frameworks are still not beaten in developer productivity buy GUI or web frameworks. They have been beaten by GUIs in usability, but then the GUIs reverted into a worse option.

Too bad they were mostly proprietary and won't even run in modern hardware.

They made the "abstracted away the CRUD app", it's called Salesforce. Hows that going?

It's employing so may people who specialize in Salesforce configuration that every year San Francisco collapses under the weight of 50,000+ of them attending Dreamforce.

And it's actually kind of amazing, because a lot of people who earn six figures programming Salesforce came to it from a non-traditional software engineering background.

Agreed, it always seemed a little crazy that you could make wild amounts of money to just write software. I think the music is finally stopping and we'll all have to go back to actually knowing how to do something useful.