I'm in my early 20s. Many people here have much shorter time horizons to me.

Well... my timescale is 20 years. Many people reading this now are older than I will be in 20 years. So how will things look in 2046?

Can't say, but I find it worth thinking about.

To me it seems like the sentiment has already shifted among developers on what the scope of change we'll see with AI will be. It seems like at any point in time there's a lot of skepticism that it will ever be able to get over whatever the current big limitation right now is. But when thinking of careers they don't play out over 5 years or even 10 but 20 30 or more years.

I think it would be expensive to check. For a coding task any reviewer would need to understand programming (these people aren't cheap), the domain context, cultural differences (e.g. American "cookie" vs British "biscuit"), and make a determination.

If the AI companies just paid all of that out of the goodness of their pocketbook I'd be fine with it, but in reality I think they'd just pass on the costs. The same way that basically every business passes on spoilage, theft, return rates, etc.. So I think the value would be risk mitigation rather than cost (as in, you know if you pay for $10 worth of tokens, it will $10 worth of good tokens, but the individual token cost would need to account for all the tokens that the company doesn't get paid for)

You don't have to think the AI is better than yourself. Many coding tasks are just repetitive boilerplate... pretty simple stuff. Sometimes you have to set 20 fields on an object, refactor 10 functions to return a default value, write a generic SQL statement that returns data in a specific shape, center a div, or any number of relatively simple tasks. I wouldn't use it for the high level architectural decisions. Just a fancy context-aware autocomplete. Even though I can spell just fine, I use autocomplete on my phone all the time just to save time. I think it's a similar thing for code, if you use it properly. Of course many do just offload all the thinking and do not critically review it's work, but I think that is the wrong approach.

I agree... I think the process of coming to a conclusion yourself is different than having that solution proposed to you and accepting it.

It's not a fixed size of PhD candidates competing. A future PhD candidate may choose to not become a future PhD candidate because of changes. For example, a high school or undergraduate student might read all these articles and statistics about how funding is getting pulled and research is becoming more difficult and choose to take another path. They are no longer a competitor to be a PhD candidate, they do not bid down the prices.

I'll try it out and get back to you :)

We already have the concept of "tree", "grass", etc. it would just need to be formalized