Us old-ass developers will (hopefully) survive the AI bubble

Let's get this out of the way first:

Yes, I have written positively about AI in the past. Yes, my opinions on AI have shifted. Yes, I do still have some positive opinions about AI (mostly nerding out about how cool it is from a technological wonder perspective), but I also have serious ethical concerns about it in many facets. My general TL;DR stance is this: AI isn't going away, so we need to get active in ensuring it's ethically trained and not ruining our environment, communities and economy.

Alright, let's get into it.

I'm pretty goddamned lucky as a developer. Not because I'm still employed (although I am fucking lucky as fucking fuck on that front). Not because I have a great job (although I do) and an employer who respects me generally (fuck yes I do).

No, I'm lucky because I got my start in writing code before AI.

Hell, I got my start writing code before Stack Overflow.

Ok, I'm going to date myself here, but.. I got my start writing code before average folks even fucking had the internet (and that's me - I started learning to code from 321 Contact Magazine).

How does that make me lucky, you ask?

Well, it means I developed diagnostic skills that are going to be very important when the AI bubble crashes (and yes, I do believe it is a bubble, and it will crash).

Us old-ass developers who know how to debug will be vitally important in rescuing the vibe-coded mess that society is building for itself.

You'll note that I did say AI isn't going away; that's true, and I'm sure vibe coding tools will still exist after the bubble pops. What won't exist is the affordability of said vibe coding tools.

I'm not going to get into the AI bubble economic figures - aside from noting it's quite obvious that datacenter infrastructure is the only thing propping up the absolutely wrecked US economy right now - but it's obvious that the parallels between the dot com bubble and the AI bubble are certainly there.

Large scale investment, circular financial relationships, and quite literally zero profitability means a lot of people are going to be very sad when "pop goes the AI weasel" finally plays.

It is going to get very expensive to use AI coding tools at any significant scale.. Especially without developers to troubleshoot said code and provide the sweet, sweet prompts needed to turn around "functional" code.

Businesses won't be able to rely on a handful of junior developers to prompt an AI; They'll need people to fix the complex, messy vibe-code trash that is filled with vulnerabilities, race conditions and poor performance.

That last one is another key point: Infrastructure costs will also get kinda fucky when that bubble bursts, because the absolute fucking glut of vibe-coder startups will stop buying up storage, bandwidth and CPU cycles provided by AWS, Azure etc.

That means we'll need more people able to code up actually efficient shit, rather than what appears to work.

So, yeah. I'm lucky. I have experience not just writing, but debugging code, as well as doing things that people seem to not be able to do anymore (interpret scope, plan for growth and more).

That's what makes me a valuable member of the AI Survivalist Society..

.. Or, as I like to say ..

ASS.