If LLMs in general progress like the predictions (mostly predictions from people who are trying to sell LLMs) there will be no white collar jobs left at all and society will either collapse or reorganize.

I think this view is very myopic and needlessly ubiquitous.

I do agree that worse but cheap will be used a lot right now. But we also have it already with outsourcing, and not everything is outsourced.

Signaling theory provides a useful perspective here. If everyone has access to the same tools for thought, then everyone can arrive at the same output independent (mostly) of skill. That means the value of any one computer generated output will crash towards an average minimum. Society will notice and reward the output that is substantially better and different, because it shows that someone has something far better than the rest of access to or are capable of doing. This is even more heightened when the markets are flooded with AI slop. It’ll become obvious and distasteful.

Those with skills and ability to differentiate will continue their existing ascent.

The OP was talking about if coding agents improve as much as they are predicted to, they will put programmers out of a job.

My point is that the same people predicting those improvements are also predicting that LLMs will soon lead to super human AGIs.

Don't forget about when AI gets hooked up to robots. Even without AGI, if robotics has progressed to the point that I can have a bipedal two armed robot in my house to pick up my clothes, do the laundry, fold it, and put it away, what jobs are even left?

I was thinking religious figures might hold out for a while, then I saw people are regularly using GPT to do astrology and other quasi-religious tasks and so I think it's only a matter of time before religious jobs are toast too.

That's a lot of "if" to bet my career on. I can't see a situation where I can do most of my work using LLMs and retain my coding skills. I can see it with people who used to be great developers and moved to management. After a few years, they can't write code anymore.

But if it does happen, I'd rather be the one with enough technical skills to be able to jump in when agents aren't good enough or create new ones than the one managing them.