LLMs are glorified "LMGTFY" tools. AI assistance doesn't make people experts at anything. Some genz vibe coder isn't getting your job guys calm the heck down.
What worries me more (on coding related impact of AI - because of course all the impact on fake news and democracies are much more worrying IMO) is having to deal with code written by others using AI (yes, people can write shity code on their own, but with manageable pace)
But oh boy have I seen a lot of mediocre coders get away with mediocrity for a long time — there's a big risk that employers won't care about the quality, just the price, for long enough that the developments in AI are no longer foreseeable.
Yes, fake news driving by AI slop is a big problem, but that is only enabled by social media personality fiefdoms.
The shit is going to hit the fan if 10% of the highest paid US working population is laid off for AI outsourcing. That kind of social change brings revolution. and thats before the fracture of US social fabric.
Then why isn't the software job market recovering
Not only that, but it's pushing market rates down significantly. I'm making about 60% of what I made the past few years... I could only handle not having income for so long. I was juggling two jobs for a while, but just couldn't manage it. Hoping to pick up some side work to fill the gaps. Have to face it, a lot of the high pay contract software jobs have just dried up for now.
Daniel Stenberg (from the curl project) has blogged a bunch about AI slop seeping into vulnerability reports[1], and if the same happens to code contributions, documentation and so forth that can help turning a fun hobby project into something you dread maintaing.
[1] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-s...
Lots of graphic designers lost their jobs or at least a lot of their work now that image generation models have gotten decent at rendering text. Now any idiot can whip up some advertising graphics at half the quality of a designer, but in 1/10th the time and 1/100th the cost (or even for free!). It doesn't matter that it looks like ass and makes no sense in context, they produced an acceptable result for a fraction of the cost.
Quality does not matter in the market, it never has. Whoever can produce the most slop at the lowest price nearly always wins. Yes, there are exceptions, many of them even. But not enough to employ nearly as many of us as there are now.