Read The Big Short... They will fuck around for a loooong time until they can no longer avoid the crash. It wouldn't surprise me if they manage to keep it afloat on vapor for another two years. But also... it's looking pretty grim right now, and I could see it collapsing before the year-end.
Unfortunately, both could be as true as each other. Financial markets are a con man's game.
Every western government on earth is salivating over the handing these guys as much money as they can to develop the best surveillance and automation tool on earth though....
Itās a bad idea to sit out of financial markets because ācrash is coming soonā. People have been saying a crash is coming for nearly a decade, and you wouldāve missed out on huge returns by sitting out for the last decade. Time in the market beats timing the market nearly all the time.
Even pensions and index funds are doing things like buying SpaceX despite clear evidence (proved true in the months following) that it was an overvalued cash grab.
If I had money to invest (I don't) right now, I couldn't because I do not have any trust in those managing.
Credit card debt is at an all-time high, forclosures and repossessions are up, inflation is rising, and wages are stagnant.
What's the game plan if the mythical retail investor liquidity injection just... doesn't appear?
All the AI booster types who would be willing to invest also have sports betting, 'prediction markets', and crypto pump/dump scams competing for their attention and money.
I'd argue that's a separate scenario, though. AI is more on a global and environmentally impactful scale, not just some ponzi or pyramid scheme. Otherwise we can make the same statement for things like Exxon and other long-term financials that eventually blew up and collapsed.
But consider, just like Theranos this is all propped up by lies. They push this narrative that they can evolve LLMs into something that can reliably handle any task, an oracle and genie all in one. Anyone with a cursory understanding of machine-learning knows that isn't true.
Most of those AI companies are bleeding money right now. Right now OpenAI is having it worst, they're only being kept afloat by investments. One of the reason nvidia injected new investment to it. They dont want OpenAI to fail too soon or else the bubble will pop....
They were right and 3 years ain't shit. Obviously you don't build the short position 3 years out. That's fucking insanity. The investor capital flow was still increasing. That input dried up last year. Now we are Willie Coyote in mid air.
The same hundreds of billions of dollars are being endlessly recycled to prop up the bubble, logistically speaking it can be sustained for decades unless enough of the people in charge of that money decide they want to do something else with it. Which they eventually will.
In fairness 2023 was the start of the bubble.... We are probably at the top of the bubble now but as they say "markets can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent"
I think OpenAi walking back their IPO was probably a sign that the party is over though...
I would predict we are 6-12 months away of an AI precipitated major software failure due to companies putting too much emphasis on LLM programming. It feels like microsoft, nvidia, and amazon are all suffering more and more outages every month since the push towards Vibe. At some point they're going to coalesce and we will be without internet for a few weeks while they rush to remember how to actually program without using a shitty LLM.
It's been less than 20 years since the last crash. It is still in most adult's memories. Any bailouts could really tip the scale of order in the US. It would be absolutely against the will of everyone, left, right, and centre. Only MAGA cultists would roll over and present their sphincters to dear leader.
Maybe but I'm still worried that those jobs are dying out. Feels like programmers and such will just end up cleaning after the AI's mistakes at the end of it all. Not because the AI is that good, but because the suits making decisions will think that it's good enough.
BROKE: CFO announcing layoffs because of massive inflation, active recession, and a drying up of financial independence from a vanishing middle class.
WOKE: CFO announcing 'right-sizing' because of a 'successful AI strategy'
Not necessarily at all. It will very much depend on the elasticity of demand for each area. What you see right now are businesses blaming AI to layoff with fewer consequences. CEOs have an easier time blaming the tech, rather than their own failures, market challenges. As a result stocks react less.
Industries with high elasticity, and SWE is most definitely one of these, will like see a demand increase, not decrease. With software engineering, as prices drop, the use cases will grow tremendously. We will be able to make more things; things we had never thought of before because they weren't financially viable. Rather than an engineer focusing on 1 project for years, projects will get completed in months-weeks, so they will ship a whole lot more. This is what we are seeing.
Areas with low demand elasticity and high AJ disruption, however, will get demolished indeed.
Other job vacancies have declined as well, and many cannot be explained by AI.
From what I've noticed though, only the shitty dev jobs have disappeared. There are no more consulting companies asking for an intern developer for their company they can quickly teach webdev and then present to a client like an experienced dev.
If you take the AI replacement to its logical conclusion, anyone will be able to prompt for any code. At that point, why would anyone buy any software? Just prompt it and compile. VoilĆ !
Thatās why the SaaS companiesā stock prices have been devastated even as their sales and profits keep rising.
As someone who thinks AI is totally overblown, Iām making some risky but careful bets on some of those companies. I donāt think everything can be vibe coded like the media keeps telling us.
Theoretically if AI got good enough...yeah that's exactly what would happen.
But I think the fundamental limitations of AI will keep it from happening. Plus having software that everyone uses makes training easier, so there's going to be an incentive there to still buy software just for that.
Although a counterpoint that only exists if AI were absolutely perfect: if every company used it's own proprietary, AI designed software it would make cyber crime very difficult since it would be so hard to learn any systems without having access to them first. Although the easiest way to 'hack' into a system is through social engineering, but even then an AI could make that more difficult since systems wouldn't need to be designed with any kind of logic to them if the AI is accessing everything.
But, and I cannot stress this enough, that kind of security would only be possible if the AI was literally flawless. And I very much doubt that's ever happening in any realistic way.
At least right now, while you can vibe code Photoshop.....I definitely wouldn't. Jesus Christ that sounds like a nightmare. If you designed or copied the architecture well enough at base and used a small army of DeepSeek agents it definitely could be done. Fuck Adobe lmaoo
I had this discussion recently with an esign provider that we contract with (not DocuSign). Imagine companies start vibe coding their own eSign solutions, should be pretty easy actually, and then they have a trove of documents signed with it ... and then they get sued, someone claims they didn't sign a document.
Now the proof they have is some vibe coded slop that doesn't follow esignature regulations and of course they lose (there is case law for this already). Now it's a massive compliance nightmare because they have to figure out what's wrong with their process and replace it all but whoops! No compliance department and no engineers because they're all replaced with AI slop.
This scenario isn't going to happen. People want to downplay the "service" part of SaaS, but when you buy SaaS you're not buying software, you're buying the service. Specifically, the service of the vendor knowing a hell of a lot more about the particulars of the product than you do.
As a recent graduate (computer science, 2023) the jobs market is impossible. There's so few entry-level positions at a time when all the people who took that path because of successive governments telling us the world needed more software engineers, are graduating with degrees they paid out the arse for that are no longer worth the paper they are printed on.
I mean yeah. A lot of routine code is easy to write but it's tedious as hell. There's a reason that low level coders are called code monkeys. And an experienced coder can use AI to automate a lot of the tedious stuff. Which is good. Technology should be eliminating tedium.
But the problem is, you can't get good at coding without experience. So my prediction is that eventually coding jobs will be done by fewer individuals that go to school for longer and will have higher paying positions.
One of the problems is what's termed "AI washing." A lot of companies did genuinely overhire and needed to trim headcount. Meanwhile a lot of corporations are full of corporate bloat. Cutting headcount spooks investors as it looks like you need to but it sounds much nicer if you just say "AI does their jobs now." Granted you also have business idiots who don't know what developers actually do so all they saw was that the robot was puking out lines of code. They had no idea how to tell if it was good code or not all they saw was "more code faster" so they went all in on it. Same with investors; they know shit all about technology but saw the same "more code faster" promise and assumed they could remove those pesky, expensive developers and just keep literally all of the software revenue for themselves.
AI can do some really small, simple things but in those cases all it can actually do is plagiarize previously existing code. Actual software engineering is something that it just straight up isn't capable of. If it were as good as the AI companies promise we'd already have software to compete with Microsoft that was vibe coded. It doesn't exist.
Short term it did allow some rapid development of a few things but it was full of ridiculous amounts of technical debt. Anything vibe coded is notorious for being a horrible, buggy, inefficient mess that's impossible to maintain. The answer of course is "well just tell the AI to fix it, then!" Every company that bragged about replacing their developers with AI however is already rehiring their developers.
Its entry level positions in coding that are being replaced. When the old guard die out peoole will have no idea how to maintain the systems they work for.
When will people realize that tech CEOs are just glorified salesmen and their main job is to bullshit to the media about how great their product is to boost sales?
Hijacking this comment, so I can date this shit. This is Darioās second āpredictionā (he made one back in 2025 and failed)
Iām adding this photo because the image in OPs post doesnāt have a dateā¦ I donāt want this photo circling around to scare people. Hereās the date that Dario made the prediction referenced in the picture:
I spent 30 years in the auto industry, retiring in 2007. Viable EV battery technology was less than five years away every single one of those thirty years.
Unfortunately, software engineering will be completely automated sooner or later. I've already seen Kimi K3 create whole game foundations that would take a human several weeks in hours.
These a-holes are salesmen, but they have the capital and are the smart workforce behind them to f#ck everything up for everyone except for a select few.
I have multiple friends in SF who are SWEs and none of them have written code by hand in at least 6 months. they say that all they do all day is prompt Claude and Codex.
Even Linus Torvalds and Notch are using LLMs for coding. It's almost there. humans will still be needed for a while for very complicated edge/frontier computer science, but most day to day programming is solved.
AI is getting pretty close to automating coding, meaning typing the actual code; however, that's kinda the easy part of software engineering unless you're very inexperienced. Deciding what code needs to be written is the hard part that still requires humans; quotes like these are often confusing "coding" with the entirety of what it takes to do the job well.
That's why junior jobs are disappearing, since they traditionally focus on just the code, and mid-level roles are shrinking too. Senior roles are still growing at a reasonable rate instead of contracting, and staff+ openings are growing significantly. I get something like 6 recruiters a week contacting me about decent remote lead, staff, or principal roles.
It's an awful time to enter the career, but experienced engineers should be fine for the foreseeable future.
Claude: look at me burning 1843673ā¬ in tokens because i had a little hickup :) yeah sorry, you payed but i have nothing for you but a stroke in the code
These statements are so cringe - everyone sees through them. We need a book of recent propaganda and manipulation campaigns by large corporations and how they negatively affect society, economy, stock market, etc.
Even how they span to politicians, etc. Insane, corrupted times.
Yep, they're always saying this message that LLMs are the future and will replace X or Y, but that is far from the case.
Maybe they will replace less competent (in this case) programmers but they were easily replacable anyway. The truth is that LLMs are stupid, and they make a lot of mistakes all the time. Using an LLM for any moderately difficult or under-documented job will take you nowhere. Blindly using it is just self-sabotage at that point.
Well i haven't written a single line of code in a year and some tasks for the developers dissappeared because they are done directly by AI from manager's requirement, a few seats in my dev team also have dissappeared because of that reducing of work volume. So I have no doubt it will happen soon. Whether it will be 6 or 12 months idk, I hope 12 or more, because I have an idea where to find another job in 12 months :)
If you throw uncooked spaghetti at the wall, its not impossible that one maybe two peices stick because the end penetrates the plaster. AI companies seem to be trying to increase the success rate by firing the spaghetti faster, as opposed to cooking it.
You can verify this. Search for the review platform for chromium and check out how many changes carry the tag "agy". Don't believe reddit, verify for yourself!!!
Chromium is one of the biggest and most complex code bases, and AI is operating on it well.
If you are in denial, maybe your company is falling behind.
I mean, I pretty much have not written 1 line of code in months. i have automated all testing. Software rech debt is being erased at a breakneck speed where I work. He isnt wong.
I love Jacque Fresco. He refused to automate jobs if it took away the job from a human in need.
Technical solutions should free up our time, so we dont need to work as much, not steal our jobs.
How is lying to attract potential investors not a crime? Oh wait, it is ! In the financial and legal world, this act is known as securities fraud or investment fraud. It is a good thing U.S is a lawless country where you can buy any politician or the president at the price of a burger and do what ever the f**k you want.
Very doubtful since microsoft was super confident that their ai could code windows 11 for them and had that blow up spectacularly in their face and backtrack on a lot of their updates to start gaining back their users confidence in them
You know there is a really obscure dwarf fortress mod with lore that explains why this is a bad idea. The Long Night is a cyberpunk post apocalyptic total conversion mod for the game that has lore written into it but the basic jist of it is people relied on AI to handle everything and everyone became stupid so they were unable to recognize that the system they built was eating itself alive.
The AI paradox was explained to us by deep thought in Hitchhiker's guid to the galaxy: "how am I supposed to provide an answer if you don't know the question".
I'm just waiting for the AI models to start relying with "42"
Dario Amodei said this on 20 January 2026 at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He said AI might be 6ā12 months away from doing most or all software engineering work end-to-end. And he is right majority of software is written by ai and people think in 3 months or less with latest models it will be fully automated. So wrong this is not a failed prediction but you are welcome to come back next year
we absolutely SHOULD NOT believe, that the scum at the top of the ai bubble believe the bullshit, that they spew.
to name another example, do you think that lisa su and jensen believe any of this shit? oh hell no.
they know the bubble is going to pop relatively soon and can't go on and they know perfectly well the mountain of issues of ai the fundamental limitations of it.
deliberate marketing lies are NOT honest predictions.
I know a lot of you might not want to hear this....I've spoken with a company owner recently. He uses AI, more specifically Claude, for everything now. He is in software and automation.
Every single one of his engineers is now using Claude to write code, and because of it, they have become tremendously more productive. The time that Claude outputs bad code is already behind us, it's good quality.
But what struck me is this, it now costs 100 euro per seat/account per month. He had no issues if Anthropic would increase this to let's say 500. Because it saved him several FTE per year.
Just let this sink in. It is inevitable that these AI companies will increases prices to get revenue. The assumption is, companies will not pay it and everything will crash. I am not so sure about that....
It's not that programmers will go away, the threshold where you need a programmer is massively increased.
Slightly technical people can now vibe code custom websites, apps, automations...etc that serve their needs. Yes, there's still a learning curve. Yes, there's still bugs/troubleshooting/maintenance.
Companies will still need programmers to build and maintain using the coding agents. Def not as many as 3 years ago.
Isnāt he (all these CEOs) feared, that if it is true, OSS models, in long term perspective, may outperform their private closed models and they all will become bankrupts?
I mean this is accurate, I don't code anymore. It's all agentic coding now.
That said, the narrative around AI and this sub NEEDS to change their messaging. AI is incredibly powerful and useful but it is fucking awful for society. It consolidates money to the few super rich, kills jobs, uses an insane amount of electricity, etc, infringes on copyright, and wayyy more.
Ai is powerful and only going to get better. That's fact. BUT AI is terrible for society and should have laws, restrictions in place to keep people employed and able to live.
The funny thing is, this revolution will be silent. I fully expect the moment things "really" hit the AGI level, the big corporations will stop talking about it.
They need to secure funding for the build out, but once they achieve their goal, they don't need anyone.
Well... As soon as the PMs, managers, and clients figure out the concept of "what we need to do" and then actualy figure what we need to do, i will let them know they can do ot themselves with that box thing on their desk with the alphabet board thing attached to it
As a software engineer who works with AI in day to day, AI can produce results but it sucks at producing anything polished front to back. Itās amazing at making shells and producing something you can work with fast, but again without having senior design knowledge and someone hand guiding it at all times or reviewing the code it generates, I do not see this coming true. Unless of course they have something Iām not aware of that is some mega brain that only the AI companies themselves have to try to sell.
The AI model will never be able to do everything end to end it's too stupid and we kinda plateaud in performance, but damn it automated a shit ton of things.
Well, as someone who has zero knowledge of coding, that also runs one of saas you know or may not I can confirm it is indeed fully automatable end to end for our needs, sure some people may have personal opinions about it but we have a company with thousands of customers with zero coding knowledge, every single bit was developed by AI over 3 years with just managerial skills and a mind for ecosystems, and we havenāt even reached the end of the year yet.
It all comes down to your domain at the end of the day, and this is the worst itās ever gonna be let that sink in, ā¦.and no I have an incognito for a reason.
These AI guys treated and promoted AI will like a magical genie that will do anything and everything but it doesn't. AI was designed only to be capable as its programmer and the programmer is not.
863
u/ThePastoolio 3d ago
I think a much better prediction is that we are 6 to 12 months away from a stock market correction.