Janitor Engineers [0] are already a thing? Damn. Also, all links in this article starting from the "Why AI code fails at scale" section are dead for some reason, even though it was written only 5 days ago. That raises some questions...
EDIT: Not trying to offend anyone with this [0], I've actually had the same half-joking retirement plan since the dawn of vibe coding, to become an "all-organic-code" consultant who untangles and cleans up AI-generated mess.
I’ve always found the pioneer, settler, town planner model to be a great way of thinking about this. Successful, long-term projects or organizations eventually can use all 3 types.
Maybe vibe coding replaces some pioneering work, but that still leaves a lot for settlers to do.
There's still a market, but when I looked into COBOL work out of curiosity (I've never been anywhere near it in real life), the salaries I found were surprisingly low, compared with common modern languages.
Perhaps the old adage "it's getting hard to find X employees [at the price we are willing to pay]" applies.
That surprised me because I've seen articles and heard podcasts for years where they've said COBOL programmers are well paid due to scarcity, though never quoting amounts.
EDIT: Not trying to offend anyone with this [0], I've actually had the same half-joking retirement plan since the dawn of vibe coding, to become an "all-organic-code" consultant who untangles and cleans up AI-generated mess.