Or AI usage might become too expensive as energy costs rise, datacenter equipment becomes more expensive, monopolies emerge, investor funding dries up.

Putting all ethical concerns aside, the bad code written by ClaudeGPT could also finally cause a software quality decrease and explode in the faces of the companies using them, making any velocity gains dubious. Services may also start enshittifying.

There’s also the legal aspect which is not fully settled. The dependence on US companies which might not remain OK forever in the rest of the world.

It is to be noted that, while programmers and executives are claiming they see gains, the science is not settled. Studies so far seem to indicate the contrary is observed in practice, although it remains to be seen if it stays that way in the future because, apparently, results got way better with Claude Whatever 4.6.

I’m not predicting a collapse, just saying these are plausible scenarios. And if any of them comes true, even if there’s no collapse, there will be a spot for actual software engineers that refused to use it all along and remained sharp, and they won’t be “left in the dust”.

It sure is a bad time to get into webdev though as a LLM-skeptic. You really have to choose your jobs to avoid writing code millions of developers wrote before, because there’s a good chance you’re working on something nobody needs and/or that slop machines can do it faster than you.