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> You should expect most companies to let people go at staggering numbers, with only small amounts of highly skilled people left to administer the agents

I don't buy that. The linked article makes a solid argument for why that's not likely to happen: agentic loop coding tools like Claude Code can speed up the "writing code and getting it working" piece, but the software development lifecycle has so much other work before you get to the "and now we let Claude Code go brrrrrrr" phase.

And I completely agree with that!

These are exactly the people that are going to stay, medium term.

Let's explore a fictional example that somewhat resembles my, and I suspect a lot of peoples current dayjob.

A Micro-Service architecture, each team administers 5-10 services and the whole application, which is once again only a small part of the platform as a whole is developed by maybe 100-200 devs. So something like ~200 micro services

The application architects are gonna be completely save in their jobs. And so are the lead devs in each team - at least from my perspective. Anyone else? I suspect MBAs in 5 yrs will not see their value anymore. That's gonna be the vast majority of all devs, that's likely going to cost 50% of the devs their jobs. And middle management will be slimmed down just as quickly, because you suddenly need a lot less managers.

Let’s extreme this further - why would the company exist in the first place? The customers of said company pay them because they don’t do the service themselves - but in the future when it’s laughably easy to vibe code anything your heart desires, their customers will just build the service themselves that they used to outsource!

tl;dr: in the future when vibe coding works 100% of the time, logically the only companies that will exist are the ones that have processes that AI can’t do, because all the other parts of the supply chain can all be done in-house

That scenario is a lot further out compared to what I was talking about.

It's conceivable that thats going to happen, eventually. but that'd likely require models a lot more advanced to what we have now.

The agent approach with lead devs administering and merging the code the agents made is feasible with today's models. The missing part is the tooling around the models and the development practices that that standardizes this workflow.

That's what I'd expect to take around 5 yrs to settle.

Thanks for this perspective, but I am a bit confused by some of your takes: you used "Claude Code with Opus model" in "the same toy project" with great success, which led you to conclude that this will "make a vast majority of all jobs redundant".

Toy project viability does not connect with making people redundant in the process (ever, really) — at least not for me. Care to elaborate where do you draw the optimism from?

I cannot use it on my production code base. I'm working for a company that requires the devs to code from virtual workplaces, which is a fancy term to say virtual machines running in the azure cloud. These are completely locked down and anything but copilot is forbidden from use, and enforced via firewall and process monitoring. I can still use sonnet 3.7 through that, but that's a far cry from my experience on my personal time with Claude Code.

I called it a toy project because I'm not earning money with it - hence it's a toy.

It does have medium complexity with roughly 100k loc though.

And I think I need to repeat myself, because you seem to read something into my comment that I didn't say: the building blocks exist doesn't mean that today's tooling is sufficient for this to play out, today.

I very explicitly set a time horizon of 5 yrs.

I did not miss the time horizon: this is why I put a remark of "ever, really".

"Toy project" is usually used in a different context (demonstrate something without really doing something useful): yours sounds more like a "hobby project".

That's a good point. Ive actually implemented the same project over 20 times at this point.

At the heart is my hobby of reading web and light novels. I've been implementing various versions of a scraper and ePub reader for over 15 years now, ever since I started working as a programmer.

I've been reimplementing it over the years with the primary goal of growing my experiences/ability. In the beginning it was a plain Django app, but it grew from that to various languages such as elixir, Java (multiple times with different architecture approaches), native Android, JS/TS Frontend and sometimes backend - react, angular, trpc, svelte tanstack and more.

So I know exactly how to implement it, as I've give through a lot of version for the same functionality. And the last version I implemented (tanstack) was in July, via Claude Code and got to feature parity (and more) within roughly 3 weeks.

And I might add: I'm not positive about this development either, whatsoever. I'm just expecting this to happen, to the detriment of our collective futures (as programmers)

> You should expect most companies to let people go at staggering numbers, with only small amounts of highly skilled people left to administer the agents

I'm gonna pivot to building bomb shelters maybe

Or stockpiling munitions to sell during the troubles

Maybe some kind of protest support saas. Molotov deliveries as a service, you still have to light them and throw them but I guarantee next day delivery and they will be ready to deploy into any data center you want to burn down

What Im trying to say is "companies letting people go in staggering numbers" is a societal failure state not an ideal

I find it so weird how many engineers seem positively giddy to get replaced by a chatbot that functionally cannot do the job. Ill help your molotovs as a service startup, free guillotine with every 6th order.

So what happens when someone calls in and the "AI" answers (because the receptionist has been fired and replaced by "AI"), and the caller asks to access some company record that should be private? Will the LLM always deny the request? Hint: no, not always.

There are so many flaws in your plan, I have no doubt that "AI" will ruin some companies that try to replace humans with a "tin can". LLMs are being inserted loosey-goosey into too many places by people that don't really understand the liability problems it creates. Because the LLM doesn't think, it doesn't have a job to protect, it doesn't have a family to feed. It can be gamed. It simply won't care.

The flaws in "AI" are already pretty obvious to anyone paying attention. It will only get more obvious the more LLMs get pushed into places they really do not belong.

> Will the LLM always deny the request? Hint: no, not always.

And you are confident that the human receptionist will never fall for social engineering?

I don't think data protection is even close to the biggest problem with replacing all/most employees with bots.

The human receptionist can use critical thinking, and self preservation to prevent a bad outcome. The LLM can not. When a person causes a problem, they can be fired, and learn from the event. The LLM will not learn from it. And who is responsible then? The company providing the LLM? The more LLM use becomes pervasive, the taller the house of cards gets.

> until I actually started to use some in the same toy project

Thats the key right there. Try to use it in a project that handles PII, needs data to be exact, or has many dependencies/libraries and needs to not break for critical business functions.

Who buys their crap if you fire everyone?