For everything we’ve seen about agents so far, it’s clear that they will make it far easier for people to get into previously extremely complicated fields. That will most certainly mean far more people will build software, explore creative work, research spaces they couldn’t do before, and so on.
Yet, equally, we’ve seen that people with experience in every one of those fields have a huge edge with the right judgment and historical context to leverage these tools in ways that exceed the output of the novices (if they choose to). They know when the agents are making catastrophic mistakes, can give the agents the right context to do the job better than they otherwise would have, and so on.
The combination of these two facts essentially means that we will continue to get the same lift as we’ve seen in any other technological revolution. More democratization, but similarly greater output from the experts. This then makes the experts continue to be in higher demand because over time our expectation for what we can get out of any field will just go up.
This is going to be true in essentially every important field. You’ll trust a lawyer using an agent for legal advice over someone who’s never had to experience how well a contract holds up. You’ll trust an engineer developing and running software over someone who’s never seen a production system. You’ll rely on the important instincts of a designer using agents over the average prompter.
The quality and volume of output we expect from these functions will certainly go up meaningfully, but the person with experience will always have a leg up, which is why the jobs don’t go away.