But we can still be sad that we can't get paid to do something we enjoy anymore, right? I'm planning to leave the industry once my role at this company is up. The fun is gone now and I don't want to do the new form of the job.
I enjoy the act of coding, but my ambition to create almost always exceeded my ability and the number of hours in the day. So the transition from coder (and sometimes manager) to agent orchestrator has been fairly positive.
It's not necessarily easy or pleasant to evolve, but that's life.
Nothing about this is "natural". It's all because a handful of people made the decisions in order to make money, and we're all collateral.
Now, the field comes with a perpetual $20/month tag, apparently.
I think the cat was out of the bag as soon as OpenAI proved that scaling up transformers was effective. I don't think the way it's playing out is particularly good for normal people, but the advancement of these models can't be stopped.
The light at the end of the tunnel is hardware advancement and open models. In 5 or 10 years if we can run an Opus 5.5+ model on a local device, things might not turn out so bad.
How does being sad help anyone?