Agents at Scale
The advantage that software always had was always that it scaled well.
A team of ten engineers can build a thing that works for a team of ten experts in a specific field, but, nobody gets rich doing that. The same team of ten engineers can build a thing that works for ten million consumers around the world, and while your staff costs haven't changed, your potential addressable market has, by several orders of magnitude.
A significant challenge to working at scale (there are many others) is that of quality. A team of ten experts using a custom built tool may be able to tolerate that the software fails one in a thousand times. But, if you have ten million customers, that would mean ten thousand customers write you an angry support ticket every time they use your product.
So, quality is one of the vital properties that needs to be built into software that's intended to scale.
Agentic software development (or, if you want vibe-coding) has, to a certain extent, flipped the scale/engineer proposition around.
You no longer need a team of ten engineers to build a thing that a team of ten experts use, in fact, they can quite possibly vibe it up themselves. They'll probably be quite happy too, maybe it fails one in a thousand times, but when it works, it does exactly what they need and they don't need to try to make a team of software engineers understand their precise requirements.
But, a vibe-coded application launched to millions of users will almost certainly be found to have multiple failure modes that weren't found in testing, probably within minutes of launching (waves to Epic games).
I expect, this will lead to a different way in which software as an industry is both hollowed out, but also democratised. Small businesses with niche needs will no longer hire developers to write their internal tooling. (I suspect a small industry of consultants fixing specialist tooling will thrive however.) Large, at scale, organisations will decide it's cheaper to code things by hand though, quality problems scale up with your user base, and agents are still not yet that good at creating complex software with the kind of quality you need at large scale.
So, there will be fewer small-scale jobs, fewer entry-level jobs, and the jobs that remain will be the hardest – but also the most valuable. I find myself with a new reason to be happy I'm not trying to join the tech industry as a junior developer. If I was looking at training as a software engineer though, I'd be looking long and hard at my education choices. Anything that doesn't cover the fundamentals, doesn't deal with the challenges of building for scale, and doesn't emphasise quality, probably won't give me what my potential employers will need.
So, good news for experts in niches with software needs, bad news for software engineers looking for niches.