You don’t need to completely replace a whole 200k engineer. You just need to increase each engineer’s productivity sufficiently that you can reduce the total number of engineers in your company.

> If there is some magic $10k AI that can fully replace a $200k software engineer then I'd love to see it.

I think you have multiple offers of that very AI dangling in front of you, but you might be refusing to acknowledge them. One of the problems is the way you opt to frame the issue. Does "replacing" means firing the guy hoping to replace him with a Slack webhook? Or does it mean your team decides they don't need the same headcount of medior/senior engineers because a team of junior engineers mentored by someone focusing on quality ends up being more productive?

If experts were saying the astroid will hit earth in the next 5 years, would it still be science fiction?

You acting like those two scenarios are the same is disingenuous. Fuck that.

It's not. Consider that replacing the only $200k software engineer on the project is different than replacing the third or tenth $200k software engineer on the project. To the extent AI is improving productivity of those engineers, it reduces the need for adding more engineers to that team. That may mean firing some of them, or just not hiring new ones (or fewer of them) as the project expands, as existing ones + AI can keep up with increased workload.

This seems an important thing that somebody should be concerned about. How do we get the next generation of engineers? And how will they even be able to do the senior engineer work of validating the LLM output if they haven't had the years of experience writing code themselves?