Unfortunately it won't be your sniff test that matters. It's going to be an early founder that realizes they don't need to make that extra seed round hire, or the resource limited director that decides they can forgo that one head count and still deliver the product on time, or the in house team that realizes they no longer need a dedicated front end dev because, for their purposes, AI is good enough.
Personally, the team I lead is able to ship much faster with AI assistants than without, which means in practice we can out compete much larger teams in the same space.
Sure their are things that AI will always struggle with, but those things aren't merely "senior" in nature, they're much closer to the niche expert type of problems. Engineers working on generally cutting edge work will likely be in demand and hard to replace, but many others will very likely be impacted by AI from multiple directions.
"Personally, the team I lead is able to ship much faster with AI assistants than without, which means in practice we can out compete much larger teams in the same space."
So, you're giving away your company's IP to AI firms, does your CEO understand this?
Appreciate the snark, but yes my CEO and I did have a good chat about that. My team's work is 100% open source, so if anyone wants to borrow that code I'm more than happy to share! (obviously not from a pseudonymous account, but I don't mind the API sniffing).
But there's plenty of fantastic open models now and you can increasingly run this stuff locally so you don't have to send that IP to AI firms if you don't want to.
Unfortunately it won't be your sniff test that matters. It's going to be an early founder that realizes they don't need to make that extra seed round hire, or the resource limited director that decides they can forgo that one head count and still deliver the product on time, or the in house team that realizes they no longer need a dedicated front end dev because, for their purposes, AI is good enough.
Personally, the team I lead is able to ship much faster with AI assistants than without, which means in practice we can out compete much larger teams in the same space.
Sure their are things that AI will always struggle with, but those things aren't merely "senior" in nature, they're much closer to the niche expert type of problems. Engineers working on generally cutting edge work will likely be in demand and hard to replace, but many others will very likely be impacted by AI from multiple directions.