Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?

The frequency of AI cope posts appears set to keep increasing until the very last one of us is fired. The reality is that users simply don't care about any concern to be found discussed in the church of software engineering, they want an app with a pink button, and very shortly we will be a much higher friction means to achieve that than the sloppy text generator. It's the same force behind why you can't buy high quality furniture any more or consumer devices that survive more than a few years: the vast majority of people simply don't care, they want to click "Buy" at a price level they don't have to think about and get on with their lives, only now it applies to knowledge economy work and entire industries are trying their hardest to ignore the transition we're so painfully obviously already in.

Even were it not the case for disposable CRUD Android/web apps that represent the bread and butter for half the industry, the effect on the structure of popular media is alarming in ways I don't think anyone has a hope of understanding yet. I imagine kids coming up now will not be glued to their phones anywhere nearly like the current batch are, or if they are glued to something, perhaps it is a conversational agent prompting them through an earpiece or similar.

Hand-wringing about the quality of LLM-driven app development really misses the point of all of this. We're currently using an extremely novel technology to emulate aspects of our now-defunct technology (which I believe includes the web), in much the same way fax gateways at one time were a popular application for email.

because employees produce the most overhead, software engineers more than most non-execs

we're living in times where enshittification is a reliable strategy to make money and the people doing it don't care about long-term outcomes as long as they can cash out before they happen

this is almost the entire american business landscape today

> The most recent generation of LLMs are already trained on all the code ever written.

This can't possibly be true. But if it were it would be highly illegal.

And then the thing is, how do you train new employees? Any juniors will be useless.

Year, or two of unpaid internships? It's nothing new. In my country it works like this for doctors or pharmacists - they have to do half a year of unpaid work if they want to get diploma (and I use work and not internship for reason) Because as a junior you don't bring anything of value to company, you're a loss to them.

>big cost center that operates slowly and takes a lot of effort to keep functioning

This is pretty much the reason why companies want to replace their IT teams with business analysts who can use low-code/no-code. I understand why, they don't see IT as their core function. It's not how they make money, and in many cases, IT is where they lose money.

If a company can have its own business people create reports, automate tasks, etc., using tools like Power BI and Power Automate, why would they need to hire a separate IT team just for that?