Yeah, I just don't understand the thinking here on HN anymore. (My account is 15 years old)
It was clear to me even before ChatGPT arrived that software was eventually going to go the same way agriculture went. We will simply need fewer people to do the job than before.
I don't buy that AI will completely automate away all software engineering. I think if you're not in the top ~40% skill wise, you're in serious trouble and have a bleak future.
I think we're probably past peak employment for software engineers, but I'd also be surprised if these layoffs were directly related to Cloudflare thinking they can replace their engineering teams with AI agents.
Ranking software engineers is famously hard. What does "top 40%" even mean ? Skills/Experiences/Productivity in that sector are not some Gaussian Distribution of trivially-measurable output. But even if measurable, they're not gaussian distributed for sure. My mum won't make a software engineer anyone would hire no matter how much AI you gave her to assist. If you fire all your developer staff other than the "10x-ers" who with AI assistance have gamed your metrics^W^W^Wboosted their skills to become 100x-ers then you rip the floor from your company; noone to question or review the golden code, 100% trust into something you barely understand and cannot question, and you pay for it. Maybe little now while you're being fixed on. Once AI operators try to get their "money back", there's the sucking sound of a few trillion moving from AI users to ... somewhere. Not your share price, though.
AI is a great tool. Including for software engineers to train with and learn new skills, find new application areas, build new products. It's not doing it justice to call it "autocomplete on steroids".
If these five "100x-ers" leave a year in to found their own company, not the least because they've become aware of the size of the mess, then good luck swinging your product strategy to "hey AI, sell this product I'm going to tell you to build".
It was clear to me even before ChatGPT arrived that software was eventually going to go the same way agriculture went. We will simply need fewer people to do the job than before.
I don't buy that AI will completely automate away all software engineering. I think if you're not in the top ~40% skill wise, you're in serious trouble and have a bleak future.