Nilay Patel

And what happens when you start automating the very junior programmers, and beyond that, junior roles of all kinds in white collar work?

If you don't have any junior people, where are you gonna get the mid-career people?

And if you don't have any mid-career people, where are you gonna get the senior folks?

We're already seeing layoffs across the board at tech companies.

They're all trying to do more with less and then saying the cuts are because of AI or that they're all just trying to be leaner and more cost conscious after the explosion of spending that we saw in the pandemic.

It occurs to me that

If these companies develop AGI, or even if they continue down the road they're on, which is very capable models that can basically automate software development, they will automate away a bunch of the jobs these engineers are doing that are getting paid all this money for.

Does this market realize that?

Is it contended with the idea that paying billions of dollars for a software engineer to develop the product that will automate the software engineer away is kind of a doom loop?

Or is that just not on anyone's radar?

The thing about senior engineers being less at risk is you got to get them from somewhere, right?

You got to hire junior engineers and train them and develop them into senior engineers.

But if we're hiring agents and AI to do all that work, where do the young tech workers come from?

Where do the junior engineers come from?

This talent pool is shrinking.

It seems like a set number of people are going to make all the money forever because you don't need to hire any young people anymore.

You know, they're teaching the kids cursive again.

This is a real thing.

The kids couldn't sign their names, so they started teaching them cursive again.

Can I ask you another rude question?