AI future will be nothing like present

There is a very popular opinion that coding agents just make senior devs more productive. AI is just a tool that allows you to off-load the boring part of writing code to the agent so you can focus on real engineering™. Nothing dramatic is happening, just another addition to the toolbox.

And it's not like this isn't true. It's absolutely the case that great devs are more productive with AI than ever. But in the long run this is irrelevant, because developers as we know them are about to become a historical curiosity.

How do software engineers become "great"? Apparently, through a combination of learning, working, tinkering, open sourcing, talking, and whatnot. All the normal things we did before 2023, you know what I'm talking about. That was the journey of every single great engineer of past and present. But this won't be the journey of the future, because AI is already inserted in every single step of this pipeline.

The world where you were forced to learn before you can do things quite literally does not exist anymore. And I don't care if you still have what it takes to read a book from start to finish, we're talking about incentive structure change for our group as a whole. Sure enough, there will be new things to learn and a new journey to take. Maybe it will be better or worse, that's irrelevant for now. What's important is that it will be different and it will produce a different kind of engineers.

We all know about valuable pre-2022 datasets, but there's also a very limited stock of pre-2022 people. This means that the current situation where we have thousands of competent engineers "just using AI to be more productive" is a historical anomaly. We look at our own experience and extrapolate it, but we're already a thing of the past. It doesn't matter how we use AI.

The current state of AI affairs simply can't continue past the current generation. Something will have to change. Maybe we'll figure out a new way to learn that is compatible with AI. Maybe AI will become so good that humanity won't need people who understand how things actually work. Or maybe we'll move universities off the grid Anathem style. I don't know what it will be, but it will definitely not be what we see now.

And yes, I know about fundamental technological advancements of the past. I don't care how similar AI is to printing press, or steam engine, or photography, or internet, it's also very different. AI is a genuinely novel technology and our generation has a duty to figure it out. It might take updating our etiquette or developing new tech, but we need to take this seriously.