These kinds of tooling and related work will still be there unless AI evolves to the point that it even thinks of this and announces this to all other AI entities and they also implement it properly etc.
You still need someone who understands the basics to get the good results out of the tools, but they’re not chiseling fine furniture by hand anymore, they’re throwing heaps of wood through the tablesaw instead. More productive, but more likely to lose a finger if you’re not careful.
People go to museums to admire old hand-carved furniture and travel to cities to admire the architecture of centuries past made with hand-chiseled blocks. While power tools do let people make things of equal quality faster, they're instead generally used to make things of worse quality much, much faster and the field has gone from being a craft to simply being an assembly line job. As bad as software is today, we're likely to hit even deeper lows and people will miss the days where Electron apps are good compared to what's yet to come.
There's already been one step in this direction with the Cambrian extinction of 90s/early 2000s software. People still talk about how soulful Winamp/old Windows Media Player/ZSNES/etc were.
Moving on into a concrete software example, thanks to AI productivity, we replaced a lot of expensive and crappy subscription SaaS software with our homegrown stuff. Our stuff is probably 100x simpler (everyone knows the pain of making box software for a diverse set of customer needs, everything needs to be configurable, which leads to crazy convoluted code, and a lot of it). It's also much better and cheaper to run, to say nothing of the money we save by not paying the exorbitant subscription fee.
I suspect the biggest losers of the AI revolution will be the SaaS companies whose value proposition was: Yes you can use open source for this, but the extra cost of an engineer who maintains this is more than we charge.
As for bespoke software, 'slop' software using Electron, or Unity in video games exists because people believe in the convenience of using these huge lumbering monoliths that come with a ton of baggage, while they were taught the creed that coding to the metal is too hard.
LLMs can help with that, and show people that they can do bespoke from scratch (and more importantly teach people how to do that). Claude/o3/whatever can probably help you build a game in WebGL you thought you needed a game engine for.
We went through decades of absolutely hideous slop, and now people are yearning for the past and learning how to make things that are aesthetically appealing, like the things that used to be common.
I think we're looking at at least a decade of absolute garbage coming up because it's cheap to make, and people like things that are cheap in the short term. Then people will look back at when software was "good", and use new tools to make things that were as good as they were before.
And not limited to AI and power tools, it happened with art as well. Great art was made with oil paints, watercolors, and brushes. Then digital painting and Photoshop came around and we had a long period of absolute messes on DeviantArt and a lot of knowledge of good color usage and blending was basically lost, but art was produced much faster. Now digital artists are learning traditional methods and combining it with modern technology to make digital art that can be produced faster than traditional art, but with quality that's just as good.
2005 digital paintings have a distinct, and even in the hands of great artists, very sloppy and amateurish feel. Meanwhile 2020s digital artists easily rival the greats of decades and centuries past.
If you want professional work done you’ll still hire someone but that person will also use a lot of professional grade computer tooling with it.
But there definitely won’t be as many jobs as before - especially on the low skill end.
It has never worked in the past, I'm not entirely convinced that it will work now
It won't bother them at all what the code looks like under the hood. Not that the code will look worse that what an "average" developer produces. Claude and ChatGPT both write better code than most of the existing code I usually look at.
In trades I found people were very opinionated about the Right Way to do things, but we tended to cut corners constantly there as well. People who work in a craft seem to like the idea of doing things right more than they actually do things right in practice. We end up with gaps in our flooring, ugly solder joints in our plumbing, creaking decks, cracked concrete, and a cookie disclaimer that returns every time you refresh the page.
My experience of moving from tech to doing a lot of home renovations and dealing with hundreds of trades people is that it was just like tech. 90% of people in 90% of environments are just trying to make it work so they can collect their pay-cheque and go home.
High quality output in any domain is a result of stumbling across the 10% of genuinely passionate people, and creating the 10% environment for them to want to be passionate in. If you don't luck out with that, everything will still work, it'll just be a bit rough round the edges.
Although I still wonder how long we're in this phase and how ubiquitous it will be, because didn't power tools coincide with improved automation in factories eliminating manufacturing jobs?