Then along game the flying shuttle and the weavers were even happier - producing twice as much cloth and needing half as many spinners.

The the spinning jenny came along and spinners (typically the wife of the weaver) were basically unemployed, so much so that the workers took to breaking into the factories to destroy the jennys.

But the weavers were on the same track. They no longer owned their own equipment in their own home, they were centralised in factories using equipment owned by the industrialists.

Over the entire period first spinners, then weavers, lost their jobs, even with the massive explosion in output.

Meanwhile lower skilled jobs (typically with barely paid children) abounded (with no safety requirements)

Fortunately in the 1800s English industrialists had some amount of virtue, and the workers organised into unions, so economic damage wasn't as widespread as it could have been.

This power imbalance between the owners and workers was only really arrested after the world wars - first with ww1 where many owner's sent their children to battle and lost their heirs, then later with strong government reacting to the public post ww2.

It already seemed like we were approaching the limit of what it makes sense to develop, with 15 frameworks for the same thing and a new one coming out next week, lots of services offering the same things, and even in games, the glut of games on offer was deafening and crushing game projects of all sizes all over the place.

Now it seems like we're sitting on a tree branch and sawing it off on both sides.

If you state “in 6 months AI will not require that much knowledge to be effective” every year and it hasn’t happened yet then every time it has been stated has been false up to this point.

In 6 months we can come back to this thread and determine the truth value for the premise. I would guess it will be false as it has been historically so far.

I think that this has been true, though maybe not quiet a strongly as strongly worded as your quote says it.

The original statement was "Maybe GP is right that at first only skilled developers can wield them to full effect, but it's obviously not going to stop there."

"full effect" is a pretty squishy term.

My more concrete claim (and similar to "Ask again in 6 months. A year.") is the following.

With every new frontier model released [0]:

1. the level of technical expertise required to achieve a given task decreases, or

2. the difficulty/complexity/size of a task that a inexperienced user can accomplish increases.

I think either of these two versions is objectively true looking back and will continue being true going forward. And, the amount that it increases by is not trivial.

[0] or every X months to account for tweaks, new tooling (Claude Code is not even a year old yet!), and new approaches.

Claude Code came out a year ago.