AI doesn't replace white collar work

It's extremely common for people to be unable to project into the future when there is a bias in the way. Anytime you see a blatant failure to look beyond the tip of their nose by a person, it's almost always due to their own biases getting in the way (ie it's irrationality, they're giving up reason in exchange for not having to challenge their own position/s).

The other side of that irrationality coin is 2D extrapolation: a thing happened (or a context is such N), so therefore I shall extrapolate it happening again (once or many times) into the future on a smooth line, so as to fit my bias.

Is the line monotonic and continuously differentiable?

I agree with you that this article isn’t particularly convincing.

From my opinion, the block layoffs were a test, to see how a) a software company manages with only half of its employees now that there's powerful LLMs, and b) how the remaining employees react to the imminent threat of them being laid off as well.

If block succeeds, we'll see more layoffs of that kind, probably even more extreme ones. You are not top senior level employee? Out. You don't single handedly cause 30% of the AI spend on your 15 person team? Out.

People say how in five years there won't be seniors because one stopped junior hiring... in five years the seniors won't be needed either. Already today, we have single person billion dollar exits, high schoolers making millions from food apps. This is thanks to LLMs.

The technology is there to replace most of the white collar work, it's just not applied enough yet. The economic system needs to adapt to not having labor being such a big redistributor.

Technology didn't replace agricultural workers either, but you'd think it did when you consider how few people work in agriculture as a share of the population today.

By providing productivity tools you do effectively replace jobs because there's only so much of a good or service a person will want to consume.

For example, just because a game dev studios can make 10x more games with AI, this doesn't mean the industry will make 10x more money unless demand for video games increases. Instead what is likely to happen as the cost of making games reduces is that the price of games for consumers will drop too as competition increases, which will turn hurt game dev profits, so game dev studios will likely have to be 10x smaller in the future – even if there's still technically people working in the industry.

However when the work of agricultural workers became increasingly automated there were lots of other industries people could work instead, at the time that was factory work, and although the details will be different, I'm sure to some extent this will happen with white collar work too. But the question I'd ask today is what is that alternative source work, and is it as good as white collar work?

Our economy went from, farming -> factory work -> office work. I strongly suspect the next step will be more people working in manual labour jobs and working in servant type roles. It's hard to see where else the demand will come from.

People used to be programmers, but the ratio of typing to problem solving eventually caught up. Now programming is just part of the job.

Software engineering is falling to this trend too (somewhat)

The solution is to stop merely thinking of yourself as a software engineer and move up to the level of “manager of agents”.. but actually, managers deal with human stuff and this is fascinatingly mechanical - in fact even the unpredictability of these new tools is quite predictable. And so, a more useful framing is “software development process engineer”.

You can look at all the literature on building factories and production lines for ideas on what you’ll be doing.

You shouldn’t ever just have your agent write the software then review and ship it. You are missing massive opportunities to take yourself out of more loops over time. What self-reflection are you and the model doing to catch opportunities to improve? What is your method for codifying your acceptance criteria, so your agents can do the work to higher quality over time without you in the loop to get it there? What’s your process for continuous improvement? How do your models know what work other team members’ models are doing simultaneously so there’s less stepping on toes? Can THAT be automated so you don’t need to sit in Slack and trade “human-verbal locks” on areas of the architecture?

There’s immense room for creativity in the role of a software development process engineer.