Making things easier (or cheaper) is the entire point of AI. If AI is great because it makes writing software easier (or cheaper), then AI is also terrible when it makes publishing slop easier (or cheaper).
I'd love to work for some company distilling frontier models. Seems like interesting work and screwing with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google would feel fantastic.
I got a beautiful Latex template for my master thesis many years ago. I still remember fixing some things and it took me multiple days to figure out how this giant tangled web of a template worked. A year ago I tried to recreate the same look in a typst document. It took me less than a day to build it from scratch. Typst is genuinely one of the most awesome things I have seen in the last few years.
I think be both agree that the future of software engineering is very uncertain right now (and likely will be for years). For me personally that alone is enough to recommend not investing money and time to get into software engineering anymore.
LLMs are trained to mimic human language production. If humans have heartstrings and the LLM does a good job at mimicking human language production, it will also mimic those heartstrings.
The fact that AI currently requires some human supervision to produce valuable results is not a good predictor that it will stay this way sadly. LLMs were basically unable to reason two years ago. They are now better at many reasoning tasks than most people. If there is even a remote chance that LLMs will make your job obsolete I would pivot as fast as I could. This includes first and foremost software engineering.
I don't get it either. LLMs put the enshittification of software engineering into overdrive. The job is less fun (reviewing AI slop, sometimes even produced by entirely non-tech people like managers), the expectation of increased productivity, the expectation that we can now do the job of multiple people and salaries will decrease as well. I don't understand how so many software engineers I know cheer for this technology.
Do they not see that this will drastically change their lives for the worse? I'm in Europe, none of them has ever earned "fuck you" money.