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neither job is automated (software and understanding aren't cheap), but there's progress generating what was historically a key part of the work product (code and proofs) software cos get that they have to draw the rest of the owl (qa, high-level design, etc.). mathematicians want the same thing

I have a couple of engineers with reactions to a catastrophe

I'd say it's been bad for software engineers too; lack of junior role hiring, excessive firing and reduced demand of labor in favor of senior dev running herds of agents

i’ve heard mixed messages on the junior part. i think you’re probably right, but some insist that older people tend not to understand AI like younger people do. i guess we’ll see how it pans out long term

Math and coding hasn't been automated, even by models as advanced as Fable I still have to deal with terrible code reuse and catching it's errors. Claude Code itself has bugs in it

Automation may not mean you have less work. Automation is measured by increase in output. Are you seeing more of that, or not? Honest question, for me its a gamechanger, but your POv may differ, and I’d like to understand why.

Blind output or productive output? I would have hoped we learned decades ago not to measure software quality by quantity, "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight" - Bill Gates. Do we need a book called The Mythical Bot Month?

Also lot of software engineering is about automating things. That is why wages are higher. For same reason I think software engineering will be one of the last professions, because lot of people will move to automate physical world with robots, when there isn't work left in the digital realm.

I think you might just be describing academia vs industry.

I don't think that's the case at all. Agree it might feel a bit more like a bomb shell now but that's because there has been great leaps recently so it feels like AI is "now" able to do maths, LLM engineering capability has grown gradually by virtue of being used case zero

Parts of maths will be massively spread up, we'll have AI proof factories spitting out results all over the place. Fine. But the pursuit of maths is about the journey. The whole point is that humans are not just along for the ride like a lot of software engineering is. It's not purely outcome lead

It felt catastrophic for engineers too, but engineers have already had time to process