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We went from LEARN TO CODE to NO ONE LEARN TO CODE GET A CONSTRUCTION JOB in about a 3 year span.
(self.showerthoughts)
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
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That won't stop large corporations from dramatically reducing programming jobs my friend.
Until they notice that cleaning up after failed AI-written code is more expensive than writing working code from the start. Which is already happening for some companies.
Yes. We're just getting there. Three years ago, there wasn't much hiring of junior developers, and it takes about three years for a junior to grow into a senior.
It also takes 3-5 years for stupid code choices to hurt in ways that affect a businesses bottom line.
These two factors should boil over each-other nicely in the near future.
We might have vastly different definitions what is a senior then, or you're peaking at the Donner-Kebab curve.
I'm referring to the usual definition for the job title, "Senior Developer". It's also a pretty good bare minimum skill definition needed to not constantly make costly mistakes.
I didn't set the industry wide definition, I am using it.
If you're angry with the lack of titles that reflect real seniority, join a union, or start one!
Why are you pushing emotions at me? Don't do it.
Even google's Ai summary slop says that industry standard is 5-10 years, not 3.
I watched in real time tech bros defending AI about stealing everyone's art to them realizing that they're creating something that will replace them. It was sad funny.
Some people are only shuffling cards to justify whatever they want next.
I am not an artist. I had no problem with the robot-that-draws-anything being shown every picture on the internet. If 4 GB of linear algebra somehow pirated all one billion images, then it pirated four bytes of each.
But I am a programmer. When Microsoft announced Copilot would train on GPL code, I was incensed... at first. Then they started training on everything. Once it became clear copyright was not an obstacle, copyleft objections needed reconsidering.
Ultimately it's a tool. Some person has to use it. Looms displaced weavers, but textiles weren't an all-robot industry, in the year of our lord eighteen hundred and twelve. The complete mechanization of mathematics didn't eliminate accountants.
What changes is how much one person can do, and how skilled they should be to do it. Like, I can write raw machine code, because I'm a fucking maniac. But I don't expect that of others. It's not crucial to any normal job. If the typical vibe coder enters the workforce with their only practiced skills being high-level goals and debugging... fantastic. Hop to it!
If a model trained on Disney movies from before you were born lets anyone sketch arbitrary cartoons into existence, there's not gonna be fewer people making art. I don't care if they're incapable of putting dragon tits on a rock using charcoal. If they need a big machine to do a thing, they still did the thing. I'm not about to get mad at that in defense of copyright or capitalism.
Dude, would you still feel that way if you spent years on a project that only you worked on, and the computer spit it out to someone else to claim as their own? Maybe you would be okay with it. I'm fucking not. Also, it's just a tool right now, it might be able to replace you in a year or so.
It won't replace me, a person using it will. Someone with less education may take the place of several highly skilled professionals. Like every other advancement in the industrial revolution. A program is only a tool. Unless you're picturing Asimov-grade automatic servants, in which case fuck all this work shit, have them do it for us.
Any whole reproduction is a failure to train the model. Literal billions have been spent avoiding it, not for fear for flesh-eating lawyers, but because it's less useful. It reveals an inability to generalize. On some level, if you ask it to recite Genesis, it should paraphrase.
That person using it will be at lowest, middle management. So yeah, you're being replaced because your job won't exist.
Distinction without difference.
Again, saying this as a professional software engineer: if you seriously believe software will be created by complete novices describing it into existence and then nitpicking what's wrong with it, that's fucking awesome. That is a dream we've chased for sixty years.
You're either wealthy, retired, and/or have no empathy to think this is a good thing.
Two centuries since the Luddites, and people still pretend 'people may starve because everything got easier' is a problem with technology.
So wealthy and no empathy it is, a true tech bro. People did starve because it creates a huge divide between the rich and the poor. Up until new technology and regulations came around, there was a fuck ton of starving. You seem smart enough to know that.
I apologize for trusting inference, after you've decided on an effigy to project.
THE PROBLEM IS CAPITALISM, STUPID.
Yeah, I know people starved, despite things getting easier. I am the one pointing out that's not caused by... things getting easier. It is an abject failure of society. It is an economic wreck. Things getting easier is good, actually, for reasons I really should not have to explain. Stop getting mad at things getting easier, when the problem is the rich / poor divide you're sneering at, like it's not what I'm already fucking talking about.
So, you're a communist? Oh great. Name one communist country (note: that people want to live in and aren't forced) that lasted more than 10 years at any time in history, since cities have been established. At any time in history. I'll wait.
Pictured: just shuffling cards.
No, as it happens, I'm a milquetoast liberal. But I recognize all of the things you just mentioned require systemic protections against letting money decide everything. Capitalism alone is too stupid to figure out 'easier food' means fewer people should starve. We don't have to burn it all down and start over, to catch these failure cases, and just... give people stuff, when there's suddenly more of it.
Stuff getting easier isn't the problem. Keeping it hard is not a solution.
Just take some of the money the rich fuckers get, and give it to the people who used to make their stuff. The stuff's getting made, either way.
I 100% agree with that. Still, don't fucking steal everyone's copyrighted art of any kind. I don't care if you're a person making art in your basement or you're making it for museums. Leave the artists alone, it's hard enough as it is.
Not even piracy is theft, and this is not piracy. Training is transformative use. A four-gig model should be worse at reproducing the Mona Lisa than a 40 KB JPEG. Anything less famous should have the accuracy of oral tradition.
This is a whole new kind of software, more complex than anything we know how to do any other way, and it performs witchcraft. You, personally, expect it to replace anything I could ever write. It could do that even if we erased all existing models and started from public-domain custom-made artisanally-sourced data. The delay would be minor and pointless. It doesn't even work yet, and the rich fuckers are going, stuff's getting easier, let's make life harder.
Technology is not the problem.
You're right, it's technology that's been programmed to steal people's art that's the problem. Stop it.
Doing what you expect would not fix what you're complaining about.
Say we tossed all this out, and only trained on a tiny set of varied images, made specifically for this training. We create a bespoke from-scratch model that's free and clear of any concerns for authorship, copyright, permission, or content.
That model could still copy any artist's style. However close or abstract the approximation, it's only a vector in some n-dimensional space. Some guy uses thick lines, purple shadows, extreme perspectives? Then so long as the new model has concepts of line width, shadow tint, and foreshortening, all you gotta do is probe for how it classifies that guy's work, versus anyone else's.
This is how models published a year ago can be made to reproduce anime characters who were announced yesterday. If you can describe Hatsune Miku in terms of her distinguishing features then any worthwhile model will satisfy those labels.
Then pay the artists who the models stole the style from. You can't copy a style unless the artist agrees. Also, all artist's work used as a source must be credited.
... if I draw in another artist's style, using my human hands, do I owe them money?
Legally speaking, do I even owe them credit?
Yes, you do. It's fuzzy about how much you can do it and cross the line, but it's illegal. If you use my art to create someone's other art, then get permission and pay me. Just like in the movies, give credit where credit is due.
"Using your art" is not in any sense the same thing as "drawing in your style."
You can't keep equivocating between wholesale copy-pasting and... anything else.
And again: a character created yesterday can still be recreated with existing models. That art plainly was not used for the model - it did not exist, yet.
They will be forced to replace the laid off workers when they see that AI doesn’t replace them. Having a skill will still be valuable. Search “Klarna AI rehire”. That’s just support agents. Coders will be fine.
Sounds like a lot of opportunities opening up for smaller independent companies.