“There is no evidence” is not skepticism. It’s abdication. It’s what people say when they want the implications to go away without engaging with anything concrete. If there is “a lot of evidence of the opposite,” the minimum requirement is to name one metric, one study, or one observable trend. You didn’t. You just asserted it and moved on, which is not how serious disagreement works.

“You first, lol” isn’t a rebuttal either. It’s an evasion. The claim was not “the labor market has already flipped.” The claim was that AI-assisted coding has changed individual leverage, and that extrapolating that change leads somewhere uncomfortable. Demanding proof that the future has already happened is a category error, not a clever retort.

And yes, the self-delusion paragraph clearly hit, because instead of addressing it, you waved vaguely and disengaged. That’s a tell. When identity is involved, people stop arguing substance and start contesting whether evidence is allowed to count yet.

Now let’s talk about evidence, using sources who are not selling LLMs, not building them, and not financially dependent on hype.

Martin Fowler has explicitly written about AI-assisted development changing how code is produced, reviewed, and maintained, noting that large portions of what used to be hands-on programmer labor are being absorbed by tools. His framing is cautious, but clear: AI is collapsing layers of work, not merely speeding up typing. That is labor substitution at the task level.

Kent Beck, one of the most conservative voices in software engineering, has publicly stated that AI pair-programming fundamentally changes how much code a single developer can responsibly produce, and that this alters team dynamics and staffing assumptions. Beck is not bullish by temperament. When he says the workflow has changed, he means it.

Bjarne Stroustrup has explicitly acknowledged that AI-assisted code generation changes the economics of programming by automating work that previously required skilled human attention, while also warning about misuse. The warning matters, but the admission matters more: the work is being automated.

Microsoft Research, which is structurally separated from product marketing, has published peer-reviewed studies showing that developers using AI coding assistants complete tasks significantly faster and with lower cognitive load. These papers are not written by executives. They are written by researchers whose credibility depends on methodological restraint, not hype.

GitHub Copilot’s controlled studies, authored with external researchers, show measurable increases in task completion speed, reduced time-to-first-solution, and increased throughput. You can argue about long-term quality. You cannot argue “no evidence” without pretending these studies don’t exist.

Then there is plain, boring observation.

AI-assisted coding is directly eliminating discrete units of programmer labor: boilerplate, CRUD endpoints, test scaffolding, migrations, refactors, first drafts, glue code. These were not side chores. They were how junior and mid-level engineers justified headcount. That work is disappearing as a category, which is why junior hiring is down and why backfills quietly don’t happen.

You don’t need mass layoffs to identify a structural shift. Structural change shows up first in roles that stop being hired, positions that don’t get replaced, and how much one person can ship. Waiting for headline employment numbers before acknowledging the trend is mistaking lagging indicators for evidence.

If you want to argue that AI-assisted coding will not compress labor this time, that’s a valid position. But then you need to explain why higher individual leverage won’t reduce team size. Why faster idea-to-code cycles won’t eliminate roles. Why organizations will keep paying for surplus engineering labor when fewer people can deliver the same output.

But “there is no evidence” isn’t a counterargument. It’s denial wearing the aesthetic of rigor.

> If there is “a lot of evidence of the opposite,” the minimum requirement is to name one metric, one study, or one observable trend. You didn’t. You just asserted it and moved on, which is not how serious disagreement works.

I treated it with the amount of seriousness it deserves, and provided exactly as much evidence as you did lol. It's on you to prove your statement, not on me to disprove you.

Also, you still haven't provided the kind of evidence you say is necessary. None of the "evidence" you listed is actually evidence of mass change in engineering.

> AI-assisted coding is directly eliminating discrete units of programmer labor: boilerplate, CRUD endpoints, test scaffolding, migrations, refactors, first drafts, glue code.

You are not a professional engineer lol, because most of those things are already automated and have been for decades. What on earth do you think we do every day?

What you’re doing here is interesting: you’re flattening everything into “we already had tools” because admitting this is different forces you to ask which parts of your own day are actually irreplaceable. So instead of engaging the claim about leverage, you retreat to credential checks and nostalgia for scaffolding scripts from 2012.

Also, saying “this has been automated for decades” is only persuasive if those automations ever removed headcount. They didn’t. This does. Quietly. At the margin. That’s why you’re arguing semantics instead of metrics.

And the “you’re not a professional engineer” line is pure tell. People reach for status policing when the substance gets uncomfortable. If the work were as untouched as you imply, there’d be no need to defend it this hard.

Was that statement wrong? It sounds like I accurately clocked your level of expertise lol

And sure it did. We don't have test engineers or QA nearly as much as we used to, and a lot of IT work is automated, too.

Do you think we sit around, artisinally crafting code the slow way, or something?

lol. It was not only wrong. It was wildly wrong. Your tone reeks with pride and entitlement. You’re one of those engineers who thinks he’s so great and a step above everyone else who is a non-swe engineer.

Personally I think being a swe is easy. It’s one of the easiest “engineering” skills you can learn hence why you have tons of people learning by themselves or from boot camps while other engineering fields require much more rigor and training to be successful. There’s no bootcamp to be a rocket engineer and that’s literally the difference.

The confidence you have here and how completely off base you are with your intuition on who is just evidence for how wrong you are everywhere else. You should take that to heart. Everything we are talking about is speculation, but your idiotic statements about me is on the ground evidence for how wrong you can be. Why would anyone trust your speculation about AI by how wildly wrong you are “clocking” me in.

> Do you think we sit around, artisinally crafting code the slow way, or something?

This statement is just dripping with raw arrogance. It’s insane, it just shows you think you’re better than everyone because you’re a swe. Let me get one thing straight, I’m a swe with tons of experience (likely more than you) and I’m proud of my technical knowledge and depth, but do I think that other “non swes” just look at us as if we are artisans? That’s some next level narcissism. It’s a fucking job role bro, we’re not “artisans” and nobody thinks of us that way, get off your high horse.

Also wtf do you mean by the “slow” way? Do you have communication issues? Not only will a non swe not understand you but even a swe doesn’t have a clue what the “slow” way means.

>We don't have test engineers or QA nearly as much as we used to, and a lot of IT work is automated, too.

Oh like automated testing or infra as code?? Ooooh such a great engineer you are for knowing these unknowable things that any idiot can learn. Thanks for letting me know a lot of IT work is “automated.” This area is one of the most mundane areas of software engineering, a bunch of rote procedures and best practices.

Also your “my dude” comments everywhere make you look not as smart as you probably think you look. Just some advice for you.

Good day to you sir.

Is it just me or does anyone else get strong LLM vibes from the way this is written?