Travel agents took 10 years to collapse. Developers are 3 years in (martinalderson.com)

Off topic, but I’d love a good travel agent: someone who would help me cut through all the SEO and slop reviews to find the good hotels, tours, etc., and take care of booking and logistics.

We’ve used some location-specific agencies that have been really good to work with, but you first have to find them. I’d happily pay a premium to someone who would work globally. Do such things exist?

A spicy hypothesis that SWEs net-output from a business process standpoint is comparable to a 1970s travel agents.

It is clear top executives share his perspective given the massive layoffs. But survival is a marathon not a sprint, and there’s a lot of race left to run.

From the home page of the website.

> I also teach workshops on AI development for engineering teams

So yet another article playing on FOMO about how urgent it is to get in tune with LLM usage written by someone who teaches how to use LLM.

I remember using travel agents in the 1990s. Maybe it was just the particular ones I dealt with, but the experience was terrible. I was supposed to tell them what I wanted, they would look it up, and then I'd write them a check for whatever amount they told me it would cost. Then along came the internet portals where you could easily see all of your options/prices, without a single sigh from a travel agent. To my knowledge, software developers have little in common with that industry.

> If your job is to translate requirements into code manually - and that's it - you're the generalist travel agent.

I’ve been a full-stack web programmer at five different companies over the last fifteen years, big and small, e-commerce and B2B, junior to senior to staff, and that has never fully described my responsibilities.

You guys remember HN from 2010, back when all software devs in the US and the EU would be out of job due to outsourcing?

It's incredible that 15 years later, all software devs still have a job, but this time they're going to be out of job due to AI.

Let me guess: in 15 years software devs are going to be fine but they'll all be out of their job soon because of, dunno, quantum computing maybe?

> US agents fell from 132,000 to 74,000, retail locations from 34,000 to 13,000, total jobs down 70% by 2021

What does the author mean by total jobs? 132k > 74k is -44%.

Click bait at best. AI slop at worst.

The only thing 3 years in to a collapse are low effort blogs like this.

> We're at ~2.5 years since the release of GPT-4 (the first model that could really attempt to code on any serious level) and LLM usage is >40% of the entire US population.

Sure, if you count "Google forced an AI-generated overview into my search, and I clicked on 'read more' once." as LLM usage.

> Even more astoundingly, according to the Stack Overflow developer survey LLM adoption in software engineering went from 0% in 2022 to 84% (!) in 2025

This simply isn't true. The 84% is for "using or planning to use AI tools in their development process". That's not about LLMs, not specifically about software engineering, and not even a "currently using"! Look at something like "Yes, I use AI agents at work daily" and the real figure is closer to 14%. So how do people use it? Not to write anything, but primarily as a search engine!

I don't doubt that AI is going to change software development. But let's be real about it: they aren't going to collapse the software developer industry any more than the invention of the microwave collapsed the restaurant industry.

[dead]

>Opus 4.5 has really startled me - it genuinely can do complex software engineering tasks which I'd expect a proficient developer to take hours in minutes with very few defects.

I don't use Opus, but I use Sonnet 4.5 and ChatGpt 5.1, which are only a bit down the chart.

in my daily experience, these tools can help with many tasks - scaffolding crud, writing tests, explaining how this or that part of the code works, are three that come to mind.

But a mature piece of software has usually graduated to a point that it has numerous subsystems, layers and integrations that crosstalk with each other in often hacky ways. And my work is smack dab inth middle of that. Writing a feature or fixing a bug in that soup, I have found, is something that the best AIs will slow you down with as often as they speed you up.

And that doesn't even take into consideration that a very large part of my job is just defining what the bug or feature is, before I can even begin to code. And when I'm done with the coding, lets keep in mind the fun, time consuming processes known as "code review" and "deploy to customer"

I've been unable to convince any "businessy" or liberal arts people to vibe code. I've attempted with everyone in my immediate family, friends, etc. Even when they sit on the computer and watch the AI type out a script for them that saves them hours/day, they get an "ick" factor that prevents them from trying again.

They'd rather ask me to talk to the AI for them and pay me money to do so. Heck one of my cousins offered me $5 to edit a photo with AI tools? It's a 1000% markup for clicking 4 buttons.

I can't square this with the alleged tidal wave of non-tech people replacing SWEs with AI. Non-tech people largely refuse to use the technology right in front of them to improve their productivity. They'd rather ask me to spend 20 seconds on a task and pay me to do so.

More likely than an SWE crash is an SWE dispersal. Lots of non-tech fields have automation opportunities that haven't been seized upon since one can make $500k risk free in FAANG.

If that goes away, I'd start a consulting business and ruthlessly automate Excel-based business processes with AI coding agents.

It takes me half an hour to vibe code a proof of concept web scraper and immediately demonstrate value to someone now willing to throw money at me to maintain it for them at insane profit margins since I've replaced a human repeatedly clicking on things.