Jevons paradox: will demand save engineers?

Time for the annual predictions episode! Bryan and Adam were joined by frequent future-ologists Simon Willison, Steve Klabnik, and Ian Grunert to review past predictions and peer into the future. If any of these predictions come to fruition, it's going to be an interest 1, 3, or 6 years!

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Simon Willison, Steve Klabnik, and Ian Grunert.

Previously on Oxide and Friends:

• OxF s04e02 – Open Source LLMs with Simon Willison
• OxF s02e23 – Predictions 2022
• OxF s03e20 – Predictions 2023!
• OxF s04e01 – Predictions 2024!
• OxF s05e01 – Predictions 2025

Predictions during the show:

• Adam
  • 1 year: AI companies go on an acquisition binge (especially for anything that smells like data)
  • 3 year: Crisis of AI slop open source (both projects and contributions)
  • 6 year: Jensen hands over the reins at Nvidia
  • 6 year: Tesla is out of the consumer car business
  • 6 year: With the iPhone market shrinking, Apple has several new attempts at the next potential flagship product
• Bryan
  • 1 year: "Vibe coding" is out of the lexicon -- or used strictly pejoratively it becomes a named condition (for which Adam -- in an act of nomenclature genius rivaling The Leventhal Conundrum -- suggested "Deep Blue")
  • 1 year: A frontier model company has a prominent whitepaper making the case that AI will lead to broad-based prosperity rather than job loss
  • 1 year: Harvey.ai becomes the pets.com of the AI boom -- and a harbinger of the coming bust (which becomes known as a Correction-like euphemism)
  • 1 year: A prominent S1 has revalations of economic behavior that has an effect beyond the company's IPO
  • 3 year: Frontier models treat AGI as "already done" -- and ASI as a non-goal
  • 3 year: Custom-written software thrives in lieu of SaaS
  • 6 year: DSM adds LLMs as a substance that can induce psychosis
  • 6 year: $NVDA not beyond its November 2025 peak
• Simon
  • 1 year: The AI for programming holdouts are going to have a nasty shock
  • 1 year: We're going to solve sandboxing
  • 1 year: Our own challenger disaster with respect to coding agent security - see the Normalization of Deviance in AI by Johann Rehberger
  • 3 year: Something that seems impossible for a coding agent to build today - like a full working web browser - won't just be built by coding agents, it will be unsurprising
  • 3 year: We will find out if the Jevons paradox saves our careers as software engineers or not
  • 6 year: The number of people employed to type code into computers will drop to almost nothing - it will be like punch card operators. Those of us who write code today will have very different jobs that still build software and take advantage of our previous coding experience.
• Steve
  • 1 year: Agent Orchestration will still be a hot topic. It'll be partially, but not entirely, solved. Updated with some more rigour: We won't have a "kubernetes for agents" just yet.
  • 3 year: Using AI tools when writing software professionally will be considered something closer to using autocomplete or syntax highlighting than something controversial or exceptional.
  • 6 year: AI will not have caused the total collapse of our economic and governmental systems.

If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers