I see your point, but I'm having personally having a different experience.

A client of mine has gotten quite good at using Bolt and Lovable. He has since put me on 3 more projects that he dreamed up and vibe coded that would just be a figment of his imagination pre-AI.

He knows what's involved in software development, and knows that he can't take it all the way with these tools.

There are far more programmers now than in 1980, yet the average programmer makes far more (inflation adjusted) now.

And the quality of what they develop is in the gutter, on average.

It was in 1980, too.

Absolutely not, not to the same extent. That's a really illogical statement on your part, considering that the technical barrier to entry to even begin to think about developing a program in 1980 was much, much higher than what it's been for more than a decade now.

Thank the Bangalore office for that.

Maintaining and rewriting existing shit is quite well paying though, and also something that AI seems to struggle with. (Funnily enough, AI seems to struggles even more with refactoring vibecoded projects than with refactoring human-written apps. What that says about the quality of the vibe coded code I don't know.)

Tech salaries grew because beyond rewriting and maintaining shit, even more new shit was being built from scratch.

How will the job market look like when it's all rewriting and maintaining the existing shit?

In the current state, yes. But that is also an opportunity, isn't it?

When online flight bookings came about, travel agents were displaced. The solution isn't "let's stop online flight bookings sites and protect travel agents" because that's an inefficient system

Why does every system need to be efficient?

Under capitalism, because greater margins. Under not-capitalism, so as to free up resources and labor for other things or just increase available downtime for people.

>Under capitalism, because greater margins

Under capitalism, or late-stage capitalism, if you will, more efficient procedures aren't normally allowing for greater margins. There are countless examples of more exploitative and wasteful strategies yielding much greater margins than more efficient alternatives.

Fractional reserve lending, rehypothecation, etc.

Sorry to be that guy, but would to prefer if your computer and phone each cost $5000?

In some ways I would, computing lost something once normal people were allowed in.

> The solution isn't "let's stop online flight bookings sites and protect travel agents" because that's an inefficient system

this is akin to the self-checkout aisles in supermarkets, some of which have been rolled back to add back in more human checkout staff.

why? people liked interacting with the inefficient humans. turns out efficiency isn’t ideal in all cases.

i wasn’t trying to argue that everything should be inefficient. i was trying to point out that not everything needs to be efficient.

two very different things, and it seems (?) you may have thought i meant the former.

I know someone who will never use self-check, because he isn't getting paid to scan his own groceries.

I, on the other hand, will use whichever gets me out of the store faster. I don't view shopping for groceries as a social occasion.

I guess it takes all types.