I'm a SWE, use AI everyday to do my job, and I think the idea that AI is the cause of reduced engineer hiring is basically false.

There is probably some marginal effect, but I instead think what we're seeing today is because:

• interest rates are high relative to the boom years of 2012-2022
• this pushes the risk free rate up
• this means VCs can be more conservative
• thus they demand portfolio companies spend money more efficiently
• an easy way to be more efficient is to employ higher productivity SWEs
• this cuts out the bottom of the market because it falls below a productivity bar

If interest rates were still 0%, companies could afford to hire lower productivity engineers and things would be more similar to how they were in the past. Also, on this argument, if AI makes engineers more productive, we'd also expect AI to be putting more people over the productivity bar, and thus mitigating the higher risk free rate effects. Thus, it seems, if anything, AI is having less of a real impact than it seems like it is.

I don't know if SWE automation is coming. Programming automation is already here. Whether that puts engineers out of work remains to be seen (so far, no).

One counterpoint is that AI agents can easily hold crypto. They cannot hold stocks or even USD without legal recognition. Changes to the legal system might be very slow. Agents can already transact onchain. 

Here's a fun related hypothetical. Let's say you're a mid-career software engineer making $250k TC right now. In a world with no AI progress you plausibly have $5m+ career earnings still coming. In a world with AGI, maybe <$1m. Would you take a deal where you sell all your future earnings for, say, $2.5m right now?

(me: no, but I might consider selling a portion of future earnings in such a deal as a hedge)

Is there any way to make this kind of trade? Arguably a mortgage is kind of like this, but you have to pay that back unless the government steps in when everyone loses their jobs...

In principle, distressed sales shouldn't affect the long term price since they have nothing to do with fundamentals - so it's really just a discount for non-distressed buyers. However crypto is weird and more like a Keynesian beauty contest than most things, so who knows.

In the world where AI does put most SWEs out of work or severely curtails their future earnings, how likely is it that the economy stays in a context where USD or other fiat currencies stay valuable, and for how long? At some level we don't normally need to think about, USD has value because the US government demands citizens use that currency to pay taxes, and it has an army and can ruin your life if you refuse. 

I've mentioned it before and am glad to see people exploring the possibilities, but I really get confused whenever I try to think about (absolute or relative) asset prices along the path to AGI/ASI.