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Everyone has such nuanced perspectives on this it's great to hear. As a software developer myself almost exclusively vibe coding for the past 2 months, here are my thoughts. I was able to be productive with one hand. Since I had twins, I had an infant in my arms for 75% of the time since they were born, but was still able to create things while doing that. Llms are JV. They will not replace senior engineers, but they do take the place of a jr dev, the same way they take the place of a paralegal. Organizations still need to hire those rolls to train people up, but one man shops can get 80% of the way to the solution faster. We still live in a fiat world where time to market is important, so getting a quick and dirty project out the door is highly valuable to determine whether or not your idea has a market or if you're just building a tool for yourself. Building tools for yourself vs others is dramatically different way of coding. Once you e determined a project has value outside of your hands, you can spend time and money honing it. The chat based ui for llms is not going to enhance products. I'm building a tool called vibe check, where you have your typical kanban workflows. Having llms work off of cards or issues will yield much better results that stupid chats. Especially if I get to the point where I can have specialized agents for certain functions (a QA agent, a security minded agent, a ux designer, a test automation agent, etc) then you can have work more fully fleshed out, then have a human in the loop review it and request changes before having the coder (agent or human) go back and make changes. This is how agile development has worked in the industry. Like imagine a user story that when it gets to the done column has been fully QAd, is deemed secure, has good design, etc and there isn't coordination required between so many people, just one human coder? Enhancing a good programmer with a security/QA/devops/designer will allow teams to augment their skills until they have time or money to develop their team or org to hire people with those skills

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The JV analogy is spot on. The bigger issue for organizations is that the IT fiefdoms we’ve all grown to know and despise are over and done with - and that means the most supporting those careers is collapsing. It’s a bit like the power Bitcoin gives to those relying on legacy authority. There will still be IT careers but the bar to add value is considerably higher and you might need to support a large enterprise to make it worthwhile over just using the tech to build out your own products.
↩ replying to Phundamentals
Yes, I have always been an "automate myself out of a job" employee. Which at most orgs is highly valued besides the current one I have bc their internal politics and culture is so shitty. Like I'm a sr devops engineer, and that is a fake job ( full stack developer is fake too), especially in the age of ai. With AI, every engineer should become a manager of a team of machines doing all the things they're not skilled at. So instead of a team of devs supporting one product, you can have 1 dev supporting an entire product OR a single cross functional team of devs supporting multiple products. Most companies will fail this transition (rightly so) and go the way of the dodo, unless they are conscious and actively doing really&d and retrospectives.