General Discussion

These tools aren’t going away. Instead they’re getting better everyday. There’s a reason companies are paying for Claude code subscriptions and laying off a lot of overpaid software engineers. Coding is the one area where engineers will use them more than anywhere else.

There are a lot of concerns over AI and some are very valid, especially in some fields like education. But AI is exposing something far worse about the economy built over the last quarter century — that so many white collar jobs that were sold as the ticket to success provide little to no value aside from a paycheck.

What we instead have seen is endless degree creep, forced college debt, and endless paper pushing jobs. That supposedly dumb software could replace some of these jobs is more problematic because so many lack basic marketable skills anyways becuase college certainly didn’t give them that.

Time for UBI. The corporations will always try to save a buck. Humans can’t compete with a machine for routine tasks and just like factory automation, coding automation basically makes much of coding a routine task. Will there be mistakes? Sure, but test and script automation tools have been around for years. That didn’t stop them from being adopted. It just saved time with the testing process. The gen AI coding tools are the next step, and it just removes a lot of the grunt work. The engineers that embrace this will continue to find work and grow their skills.