The thing is, agents aren’t going away. So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things.

I mourn the loss of working on intellectually stimulating programming problems, but that’s a part of my job that’s fading. I need to decide if the remaining work - understanding requirements, managing teams, what have you - is still enjoyable enough to continue.

To be honest, I’m looking at leaving software because the job has turned into a different sort of thing than what I signed up for.

So I think this article is partly right, Bob is not learning those skills which we used to require. But I think the market is going to stop valuing those skills, so it’s not really a _problem_, except for Bob’s own intellectual loss.

I don’t like it, but I’m trying to face up to it.

They aren't going away but for some they may become prohibitively expensive after all the subsidies end.

I do think coding with local agents will keep improving to a good level but if deep thinking cloud tokens become too expensive you'll reach the limits of what your local, limited agent can do much more quickly (i.e. be even less able to do more complex work as other replies mention).

> They aren't going away but for some they may become prohibitively expensive after all the subsidies end.

Even if inference was subsidized (afaik it isn't when paying through API calls, subscription plans indeed might have losses for heavy users, but that's how any subscription model typically work, it can still be profitable overall).

Models are still improving/getting cheaper, so that seems unlikely.