everythingIsFineImGoodProgrammer

Yeah these memes are 100% cope from engineers who see companies downsizing and salaries dropping as AI shreds their market value.

The ai threat doesn’t look like “dumbass vibe coder refactoring a whole codebase with one zero shot prompt and then pushing to production”, as much as people like to dunk on this almost completely fictitious type of person.

(The only actual examples of this I can think of have been a handful of unemployed and otherwise irrelevant “influencer” cryptobros, to be honest.)

The ai threat looks like a young, reasonably competent and cheap early-career coder using ai to help them rapidly get to grips with obscure platforms (unique knowledge of which previously provided job security to experienced coders) or to pump out mindless easy busy work: to help them quickly write up a bunch of unit tests that would otherwise have taken tens of payroll-hours, or help them quickly refactor some APIs from JS to TS or whatever. That person massively reduces the pressure to hire new graduate/entry-level level jobs, and cuts the bargaining power of the greybeard who could otherwise say “good luck finding anyone else who can work with this”.

So people, seeing their careers and livelihoods under a threat that is already having a bigger impact on the job market than anything else in our lives, fantasise that actually what’s going on is the mythical Vibe Coder being hired to break everything, at which point surely the bosses will come crawling back and go back to offering $350k/year to anyone who did a Python boot camp like it’s 2011 or something.