IKEA furniture embodies many elements of good cabinet making but skips many nonessential elements. And does this more consistently than cabinet makers who can be bored, incompetent, depressed, burnt out, resentful, tired, having a bad day.
In the future AI code inevitably will embody most good software engineering practices. And will do this more consistently than software engineers who can be bored, incompetent, depressed, burnt out, resentful, tired, having a bad day.
Just look at the messages on HN or around you at your colleagues to see how mediocre the average software engineer is..
Today's IKEA is good enough for most people.
Tomorrow's AI coding will be good enough for most corporations.
Good enough to vastly reduce the need for fine craftsmen and women / software engineers.
Good enough to deskill those who call themselves cabinet makers / senior software engineers. These days the cabinet makers I personally know just do contract kitchens for project builders.
But IKEA is and AI will be, bad enough that at the high end with special requirements / taste / money / an inflated sense of self worth, some furniture makers still exist and thrive.
Perhaps 1% percent of current software engineers of today will be needed in the future when AI code inevitably has the ability to follow good software engineering practice.......
And as usual it will mainly be the mediocrities that remain ( so there is hope for you too ), with occasional islands of excellence.
The problem with this analogy (actually one of many) is that most people can make do with a cabinet that is literally identical to everyone else's. IKEA is great for that.
If you want software that is literally identical to what someone else is using then you don't need AI. You need a license to that software! That is just the traditional software model.
AI gives software that is bespoke with hundreds of decisions made, hidden from you, in the background. If it's a throwaway script, that's fine (and I don't mean to undersell this - this is a huge application). If you want a larger program that is going to form part of your business process then it will need at least some level of supervision from an actual expert.
I think the issue with your rebuttal is that companies think they have a very specific problem that needs solving, so they need bespoke software. Just read on the various HN posts where people complain about PMs moving things around for no reason other than justifying their jobs.
Everyone with any responsibility for picking any software in a company will work very hard to make things harder and more expensive, rather than easier.
People will ask for a 100k-year app, or whatever is the Ferrari of their business. If they don't get it, they will ask for the complex features they saw in that 100k-year software package, even if they won't use it.
If it internal software, they will ask you to develop it. If it's another vendor, they will complain until they get what they want, increasing the cost. If it's vibe-coded, they will try to prompt that until it becomes a mess.
I had this with all sorts of people: HR, Sales, translators, artists, marketers, data analysts, testers. Even software engineers are obsessed with having the "most complete" in the shape of Amazon AWS and things like that.
The only situation where I didn't see this happening was in startups where people are actually busy.
Yeah, that's true. Eventually you get the second batch of people who insist on doing things their way, and then that culture slowly dies.
I haven't seen any company recover from that, ever. Once they balloon to 250, 500, 1000, 2000 employees, any attempt to recover by injecting new blood is futile, you only burn out the new blood and enrages the people in the new culture. Then it dies.
This happened to a company I worked for, whose domain just expired this week, I will probably purchase them.
Depends on the business. I can easily see Generic Local Späti being fine to replace a mediocre hand-made spreadsheet of what products they've got in stock with a vibe-coded database that can OCR all the business copy of receipts from the till, while also vibe-coding a website and logo that's far less bad than the thing they got by asking their kid's schoolfriend to make both of them on the cheap in the 2015 summer holiday.
Most businesses are small. Most of the employment isn't in small businesses.
Sure, but I'm not suggesting it's good-good, I'm drawing a comparison with "a mediocre hand-made spreadsheet".
We live in a world where some genes had to be renamed because Excel evaluated their original names as dates, and genetics researchers used Excel anyway. Isn't there at least a reasonable risk of this happening with a random SKU, too?
Yeah, the analogy is more applicable to reusable software that used to be hand-crafted. For example many enterprise systems like ERPs, CRMs, CMSs, etc.
Even in that space there is still plenty of hand-crafted solutions or customization to the enterprise-system that might as well be hand-crafted solutions.
> If you want software that is literally identical to what someone else is using then you don't need AI. You need a license to that software! That is just the traditional software model.
isnt this the software model that AI is gonna kill over time? You dont need to pay a recurring license fee when you vibe code up a free tier alternative and never do maintenance on it
Depends on if code is the value. Which is rarely is to the consumer. Coding isn't the bottleneck for a better Twitter/Facebook, even if the backend behind it does demand proper code. Code isn't really the bottle neck for GTA6. Code isn't why your Netflix service gets worse by the years.
> If you want software that is literally identical ... If it's a throwaway script, that's fine (and I don't mean to undersell this - this is a huge application).
That is the application. AppleScript, VB script, IFTT - and how many drag and drop dev tools has the industry built that were supposed to be for average office workers?
Programers are like master carpenters, and the debates we keep having sum up to joinery and how a chair leg gets turned. Meanwhile there are lots of people slapping up 2x4 and plywood shelves in their garage and bootstrapping their businesses with that.
AI is changing the "is it worth your time" calculation (https://xkcd.com/1205/ ) it's delivering on the promise of all those scripting languages that were supposed to help office drones.
Not to overtax the original metaphor but /r/ikeahackers exists for a reason. Giving people fittings and hardware that all more or less work together and a bunch of reasonably high quality fiber boards is often enough to build quite a lot of bespoke stuff. Add a bit of paint and you can (and people have) build gorgeous interiors while saving a considerable amount of money.
I'm not a Luddite or a drooling evangelist; my take on AI coding is basically that it's a good accelerator if you already know the shape of what you want, and have the software engineering fundamentals to build it yourself. I find myself building a lot more stuff these days because I don't have to wrangle HTML and CSS; it's one of those things I know I can do myself but I absolutely hate, and translating designs from my brain to the browser is a horrible pain. But I know, for example, what flexbox is, so I can tell my coding agent that I want something in a certain shape, laid out with flexbox, and it handles the particulars.
I think we have to acknowledge that most software engineering is just putting mostly compatible fittings together to join mostly standard sized boards. That's okay, and unless you're doing something extremely specialized most of the time the standard solution is more than good enough. I've been loving Supabase recently as my backend for AI built things because it turns out that PostgREST is a great shape for >90% of the APIs I would normally build, and RLS handles auth modeling way more concisely than domain code, and it's very easily scriptable to do all the complicated business logic bits in a contained, testable way. It's not optimal, it's not elegant sometimes, but it's fine. Every other engineering discipline coalesced on standard operating procedures decades ago, maybe we software engineers have to swallow our pride a bit and start accepting them in our discipline too.
What a sad analogy. IKEA furniture is mostly cheap particle board crap and it's a shame that we as a humanity have cheapened our lives to the point where IKEA is some kind of standard (and the only thing) most people can afford. Back in the day furniture was artisanal and hand made yet people were able to afford and have it. Isn't that in fact weird, supposedly our societies are richer than ever before but most people can't afford artisanal goods that our forefathers would be able to afford even though they were supposedly so much poorer.
I disagree with this sentiment, IKEA furniture is much more sustainable than artisanal furniture. Most of the "back in the day" furniture came from tearing down virgin woods. Sorting + shredding-recycling + making new "cheap particle board crap" furniture takes a lot of energy, but not a lot of non-renewable resources. With increased electrification this problem is being drastically reduced and the wood is sourced from re-grown tree farms (which also have their environment problems, but it is nowhere near as bad)
I am from Brazil and before the recent soy-growing deforestation of the amazon the #1 cause of deforestation was furniture-making. My parents have a really old dinner table made from high grade wood, is it is a pain in the ass to move and it has a ton of scuffs we can't be bothered to fix. Once my parents move we will probably throw it away. It lasted 40 years (with a big varnish rework around 25 years in) but the trees used to make it will never come back, my ikea table has been with us for around 8 years and still works fine.
Particle board tech has come a long way and it is much better than it used to be, IKEA particle board is consistently "okay" to "great", but other manufacturers it is not guaranteed. The only thing it lacks (by design) is the weight, particle board will be much lighter than "normal wood" furniture, which is both good and bad depending on the situation (some types of furniture you want to be heavy).
> Most of the "back in the day" furniture came from tearing down virgin woods. Sorting + shredding-recycling + making new "cheap particle board crap" furniture takes a lot of energy, but not a lot of non-renewable resources.
It also lasted a lot longer. I have inherited furniture that must be around a 100 years old now and a lot that is over 50 years old and doing fine. A lot of my friends have older (even hundreds of years old in a fe cases). A lot of IKEA furniture will go in a decade or less, and they are far from the worst - I have chucked out furniture after three or four years. My IKEA wardrobe has deteriorated after five years.
You do not have to make better furniture by chopping down virgin woods. You can get timber from well managed forests. It is also an incentive to grow trees to maturity. You can upcycle things (the largest bit of old furniture I have got rid of went to someone who did just that). You can make better furniture by better use of recycled materials.
> particle board will be much lighter than "normal wood" furniture
It slowly buckles under load which is bad for things like bookshelves.
I moved a lot, and in different countries. I bought different IKEA furniture pieces. There's no one size fits all. IKEA is different by country, by price, by product line... For example, I have a bed I bought from IKEA made of pine wood. Just a few years old, but it shows no signs of wear, and there's no reason for it. On the other hand, I've inherited kitchen countertops and cabinets from the previous owner, and judging by the tags, they've started their second decade sometime this year. It's particle board all the way. The hinges have completely destroyed the nesting in the doors. The doors, literally, fell off. The countertop bent because of weight, temperature, humidity... it's the kitchen after all.
I've been trying to fix these things as the problems appeared, but, really, most people in this situation would probably tear the kitchen down and put the new one up. It's ironic, because we live in a "historic" neighborhood, where the houses have been built in the 18 hundreds and some, perhaps, even 17 hundreds. But absolutely nothing in these houses is more than a decade or two old. They also use materials that superficially resemble the old stuff: plastic panels with wood-like texture, unnecessarily thick aluminum window frames that resemble the old wooden ones (and open in the wrong direction!), plastic shingles that look like ceramics... And everything is made of crap. So much so that the whole neighborhood is perpetually under construction. It's like the Winchester Mystery House that its owners keep building in hopes to stay alive.
There are definitely different tiers. I've bought simple shelving that began to fall apart within years (Billy maybe?). I have 10 years old bedroom furniture still going strong (Kallax/Malm).
"The only thing it lacks is weight."
You must be being a bit hyperbolic no? Have you ever looked at artisanal/quality goods in comparison to IKEA? You can't see any quality difference?
I varies widely on piece, but even some (not all) of the cheapest wood stuff they have are pretty remarkable quality (or maybe I should say durability, the design side is still super simple for flat-packing optimizations). The non-entry-level stuff is quite good in my opinion.
But on some other stuff I tend to agree, their sofas are pretty bad in my opinion. The beds are okay, but even the non-cheap ones aren't "great".
The sustainability has to be weighed against the fact that cheap furniture doesn’t last. I know people who had to throw away furniture within just a couple years, because it was breaking down.
Meanwhile, I also know people who own pieces that are 50 years old. They look incredible and function great. Of course, we have a culture of consumerism. Most people have no desire to own or maintain something so old, they want new.
Sorry to call bullshit but I think that’s exactly what this statement is.
Just looking at our wardrobe and thinking about how it’s actually not one thing at all, but made up of dozens of different SKUs, and how I could reorder any of them individually if I needed. There are also third party sellers of parts such as runners, door rails, and the like (not that you need them since these can all be purchased from IKEA anyway).
The challenge with IKEA is colours: they used to offer more colours, but now lots of stuff is black white, grey, or beige with no other options (and sometimes white is the only option). If you need to replace a part in a colour other than that nowadays, you’ll perhaps find it difficult to impossible.
Depends on the specific piece of furniture, and how well you treat it. I have had quite mixed experience. Its not going to last like expensive stuff, but its generally far from the worst.
A large amount of ikea furniture is not cheap particle board crap. they have a range of materials for all of their products, and even some of the medium end products look nice and hold well.
Additionally, many middle-class families have "back in the day" stories where their houses were filled with bare essentials for which i'm sure an ikea bed frame would feel like an upgrade.
I think the real IKEA problem is global homogeneity (there seems to be a MALM dresser whatever home i'm in around the world), but that doesnt mean we are collectively living with a low standard.
Even their absolute high-end stuff is at best particle board with veneer. And you can bet the back will still be that thin 3mm fiberboard, no matter how high-end they look.
Unfortunately, top models nowadays have more and more hollow panels.
Seems to me that quality’s going down and they’re trying to save money with the materials they offer. But they can still be a good enough compromise, as I found out when looking for e.g. a TV sideboard.
The wood types are clearly labeled, so its not something they are trying to hide. And i'm not sure why hollow panels in itself are necessarily a bad thing...cutting down on material without hurting design or functionality has plenty of benefits (environmental, weight, cost).
For chests of drawers and bookcases they have one configurable wood product.
All the storage solutions for the living room are tiny and almost all of them are made of unstained pine.
For wardrobes they have two products, one of which is open and looks bad and the other’s tiny.
There are no wood equivalents to Pax, Platsa or Besta, the Ikea workhorses with a modern design.
And even if they existed, I don’t think people would rush to buy them. Solid wood’s not what Ikea’s known for and would cost too much for their target market.
I’m not saying they’re bad - I own several of their products, and while I’m overall pleased with them, I don’t love them. The compromises and cost-cutting design choices are always there if you know what to look for.
None of my Ikea furniture brings me joy or makes me want to touch it. It’s functional and looks decent to good.
Hollow panels are too light, not robust enough and essentially unrepairable. One could buy some Ikea pieces and cut them / adapt them in irder to upgrade them. These panels make that impossible.
> What a sad analogy. IKEA furniture is mostly cheap particle board crap
The first time I saw GenAI compared to IKEA, it was for this reason, ~"particle board is fine for furniture, but you really don't want it to be a load-bearing part of your house".
> Isn't that in fact weird, supposedly our societies are richer than ever before but most people can't afford artisanal goods that our forefathers would be able to afford even though they were supposedly so much poorer.
Shakespeare's will gave to his wife his "second best bed"; if a relative of yours wrote in their will that you'd get a fancy antique bed, would you want it?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare's_will
> (Hint, distribution of wealth matters a lot)
This was true in the past, too. The historical artefacts we mostly see are the exceptions that survived, not what average people owned.
The tightly-packed wooden homes of London before the Great Fire just aren't there any more, and even fancy places in the same category as now-iconic British country houses were not immune, "around 4,000 were demolished between 1875 and 1975" according to https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/inspire-me/the-fal...
Back in the day artisans took care of horses and new have cheapened ourselves to use stinky cars. Back in the day we built computers with relays by hand, now we have cheapened ourselves to use weird semiconductors and use inefficient python code instead of highly optimized hand crafted assembly.
Typical sentiment I see that completely lacks any nuance. For one car vs IKEA are two completely different beasts entirely.
A car opened up new avenues that a human could never do before its invention. This itself makes it a far more worthy invention than most.
IKEA cheapened stuff and gave low quality cookie cutter furniture to everyone. Was this really a great thing, that propelled humanity forward? It’s also not like IKEA brought down the price to dirt cheap, it’s just like half or one third the price. What great thing will society lose if we ban IKEA tomorrow. People will spend a bit more on furniture, but they will have artisanal quality furniture and more artisans in society. That’s a trade I’d take any day.
IKEA allowed people to afford decent quality furniture who otherwise couldn’t afford it. That’s a huge benefit in my view. Your “spend a bit more” is actually a huge amount for artisanal quality furniture.
That’s how commodization has always worked. Something is suddenly available for the masses with maybe some loss of quality.
Look at Excel. A lot of elitists look down on people doing complex stuff with it but in reality it has enabled many people to do stuff they would otherwise have to pay a ton of money for.
Back to furniture. You are free to buy artisanal furniture but for a lot of people worldwide it would be a huge loss if Ikea didn’t exist.
Not just decent quality, decently looking furniture.
If you look at any architectural magazine, you can in most cases spot a few IKEA pieces in there if you know how to look. Because they look "good" - or at least mostly neutral.
IKEA is actually an example of a particularly horrible trade in this category. Claude estimates wood furniture price fell by 60% with IKEA. Plastic furniture on the other hand is 99% cheaper, far better at distributing furniture than IKEA ever will be.
So what did IKEA do, marginally cheaper furniture, complete destruction of demand for artisanal furniture (me alone buying some artisanal furniture is not propping up demand), apparently all our great wood workers should learn to code right now, but no worries LLM will code cheaper than them now, so maybe they should become YouTubers next.
And the particularly galling fact in this stupidity is the quality of the product is worse. Everyone now lives with worse furniture, the extra dollars they save, I guess they spend it on Netflix now, and we destroy a large avenue to express, human creativity, skill and craftsmanship for slightly cheaper furniture, lmao even. We will be perfectly fine with plastic furniture for the really poor, and higher quality more expensive hand crafted furniture for everyone else, they can maybe subscribe to Netflix less in return.
ikea made furniture easy to move, and easy to get furniture you actually want, vs being stuck with old stuff where the drawers are all stuck and its too heavy to move.
Expectations of society have changed. This cannot be discounted.
That old furniture was also expensive. A family would save up and buy a piece, use it their whole life, and often pass it on to children or other family members.
These days, with IKEA, Wayfair, etc, people throw out and get all new furniture every time they move, or even just to refresh a space. They do this because the furniture is cheap. If they saved up for a year to buy a kitchen table, it would be used for a long time and not get discarded and replaced along with fashion trends in home decor.
The high quality stuff is still out there, it’s just that most people don’t want to pay for it, as we don’t see furniture as an investment anymore.
People seem to have no problem paying $1,000 for a phone that they’ll replace in 2-3 years, yet they won’t spend $4,000 on a kitchen table that will be used 3+ times per day by the whole family for 50 years.
Genuine question: but are there still people eating meals in a home dining room in the 2020s?
Or is this just inertia of expectation from the 20th century from folk who expect "well that's just what you do" even though their dining room tables are presently covered in unrelated "temporarily put there" items?
Survivorship bias, you see only old tables or chairs that lasted, you don't see all the crap that didn't make it to present times.
False dichotomy "if it is not IKEA it is 'artisanal' great quality" — well — no our forefathers would be able to afford whatever quality had local woodworking shop and imagine that a lot of places didn't have best of te best... So IKEA made average quality much better.
> Back in the day furniture was artisanal and hand made yet people were able to afford and have it.
I'm pretty sure this is not correct. "Back in the day" artisanal solid wood furniture was so expensive that you would buy it once and keep it your entire life and then your children would use it after you die for their entire life. It was not even the same ballpark of price.
The conceit is similar to "ordinary plates vs paper plates".
Nobody is arguing that a single ordinary plate is "cheaper" than as single paper plate, but one can still argue about how TCO of a set of ordinary plates vs constantly buying a stream of new paper ones just to throw them away after each use.
Ikea furniture doesn't just break, usually. You can have the same Ikea furniture for decades. Even if it did though, you can also still buy the solid wood Amish furniture for a reasonable price if you're intending to keep it your entire life. A big Amish couch is ~$5k on the high end. A big Ikea couch is $1-2k, which people can and do buy multiple times.
It's just that people expect that they should be able to replace their furniture every five years on whims, and it also be high quality, and it also be cheap. That's their problem.
Most enterprise software written by your colleagues is mostly cheap particle board crap.
At least IKEA furniture is usually reliable and does not fail catastrophicaly unlike the crappy bug ridden enterprise software we all have deal with...Jira, SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, etc...
Mature AI will be better than the average mediocrity that calls himself a software developer.
the "code isnt the hard part" says that the quality of the code might be higher, but itll be just as buggy because the hard part was always about communicating the right thing to build
code written by ai that the end user cant complain about or communicate their complaints about will be just as bad as hand crafted artisan code that the end user cant communicate complaints about or influence
It's not weird, it's because we define wealth in terms of buying IKEA furniture that we are considered much wealthier than the past. If the affordability of handmade goods or services were the measure of wealth, then perhaps we are much poorer today. I can see how each viewpoint exhibits some contradicting insights.
Ikea sells quality stuff as well. Also it's good that we can now afford furniture where our ancestors would have a couple of chairs and a half broken table passed down for generations.
Personally I'm quite happy that dropping a plate on the ground isn't a terrible event.
I think that is false, there is more artisanal furniture today. In the past people had less furniture and most of it was junk. With power tools people can afford more good furniture, even though it is lost among all the junk. Don't forget that good furniture lasts longer than junk and what the past made is kept for decades.
Also with the much larger population today, a small percentage of craftsmen still dwarfs the output of the past.
However, Ikea furniture does not tend to collapse a critical moment 90 days after it's been put together because it was unforeseen that the cup you sat on the table would be green, which it wasn't designed to account for.
...ah the classic middle manager analogy of code is X, where X is nothing like code at all but is being used to drive a point that is just standing on poor grounds.
keep it, we have been through "is like building a house", "like following a recipe", "like a living organism", "like $SOMETHING_WITH_COMPONENTS", etc...
we can handle your IKEA furniture, thanks you for your contribution
By Dijkstra's standards, we've been vibe coding for an entire century!
I had similar thoughts recently, that now that machines are good at writing proofs, this could help with their reliability in software development.
Then I had a funny incident where an LLM implemented a feature completely backwards. Plenty of tests were supplied which demonstrated that the completely broken feature was correctly implemented.
I realized that formal verification would not have helped here, if I had left the task to the machine. It would simply have written a mathematical proof of the correctness of the incorrect feature!
Apparently this is an issue for humans as well, called the "spec gap" or something like that.
It is the reason why user stories were established, so that the person interpreting the spec knows why. Generally speaking this reduces the likelihood of this gap occuring with humans significantly. At least when they're not incompetent.
When you board a plane, don't you love thinking about how the controllers can make use of the hottest new language features? Perhaps JSON in the stdlib?
OR new languages and frameworks ever again, since they'll slow down code generation due to lack of training, and from LLM generation standpoint this is a terrible thing to trade off.
Both this and the parent takes are exceedingly odd - don’t you think that it’d lead to the language features also just getting the same proofs, as well as better libraries and frameworks? And do you not think that this would also lead to the LLMs both outputting better code since they’d be trained on the verified stuff and also because we’d have tooling to let agent loops autonomously resolve most of the issues with what they output?
I’d rather wait 5-10 years for a stdlib way of handling JSON, XML, YAML, TOML and other formats than using unproven libraries made with unserious practices that have edge cases. The same applies for processing requests, doing any sort of multiprocessing, DB interaction, validations, hell even any and all front end work all they way down to CSS. Don’t even get me started on desktop and server software and OS stuff.
Maybe then software engineering can be treated like real engineering.
> Good enough to vastly reduce the need for fine craftsmen and women / software engineers.
By your own description: No. Maybe good enough to replace mediocre-and-worse developers, at best. You have to invest disproportionate work to coax better-than-mediocre work out of an LLM.
LLMs are like 3D printed furniture. Looks flawless. But a flawless version control system in Python is about like a plastic kitchen knife or a solar powered microwave!
But how many times can you take a piece of Ikea furniture apart and put it back together again? I have friends who have moved apartments with the same Billy bookshelf 2-3 times and if they tried it one more time the thing would collapse.
Not to belabor the metaphor as heavily as my friend's Billy, but there's a maintenance corellary to be made here. Most Ikea furniture can be put together once, in one place, and left there for a long time. But once you want to change it in place it may just collapse.
> But how many times can you take a piece of Ikea furniture apart and put it back together again?
How many times can you take apart regular furniture and put it back together again? Most furniture doesn't come apart at all, just move the ikea furniture like you move any other furniture don't take it apart every time and you are fine, it would be weaker if it was possible to disassemble it without issue.
While I agree with the sentiment that there are tradeoffs, and I, personally, have a bunch of Ikea furniture that I'm happy with since it does exactly what I need it to, I think "just don't take it apart" doesn't work so well with cheaper pieces.
I had to move an Ikea dresser from one room to the other and back again, and I don't think it particularly enjoyed it. It seemed quite fragile, and I had to pay attention to not twist it too much. Whereas my grandma's furniture, which was much more solidly built, seemed fine during a long-distance move. Ditto for a Besta TV stand, which seems fine if pressure is applied from the top, much less so if I try to lift it or if it's pushed from the side.
You also cannot move most Ikea furniture without it falling apart, so taking it apart is actually the least damaging option. (Some of the higher end lines are okay)
Depends on the models and your definitions of words. I've taken my Ikea table apart 3 times now and it is still absolutely rock solid, it has inserts for screws and they looks like can be re-assembled at least a few dozen times without any issue. I've also used an ultra cheap lowest tier possible, small table from Jysk which was absolutely a cardboard inside and weighed a like a feather, it was even cheaper than lowest Ikea tier. It worked for 3 years and I disassembled it's legs mounted on the self-tapping screws twice and gifted it to a neighbor recently so that would be a third time. It was still just fine, I didn't even need to drill new holes for the screws. Kitchen and wardrobes from Ikea will likely last decades without much issue.
Ikea sells cardboard things, they also sell wooden massive furniture too (surprise) and anything in between. The quality is appropriate for all tiers and they don't collapse after a single disassembly.
These are acceptable tradeoffs in many circumstances. It's good that this kind of option is available, while there are other options for people with different priorities.
The problem is made worse because people are more likely to buy cheap furniture if they are likely to move anytime soon. There is no point investing in good furniture that might not suit the next place.
Would say it really depends on the area, also don't have historical data how many 'cabinet makers' there were before around here, but I have been trying to get a custom built cabinet (really simple, just exact measurements to make most of a small space) for a year or so. All of the cabinet makers are so overbooked, that they don't even give out quotes anymore. So ymmv, but I think it also fits this analogy.
LLM output is not like IKEA furniture at all. IKEA furniture is mass produced, identical, furniture that can be combined to accomplish some lifestyle goal.
LLM code is different every time. Sometimes it’s better than the finest custom carpentry. Frequently it is much worse than IKEA quality (in the metaphor).
I thought the whole software engineering profession was built on making more "IKEA-like" programs. Design patterns and general reusability are the pre-cut, pressed particle board, screws, and Allen-tool sets.
> “Tomorrow's AI coding will be good enough for most corporations”
Or for small businesses today who have a need to get things done, but not the knowledge to hire or manage a skilled programmer, nor the budget to pay them what they deserve.
I find most of the a16z podcast detestable (ethical & morally), but every now and then an episode is interesting or insightful. Here two founders are giving their time to their dentist’s business needs.
Which is to say, the dentist has needs but not the ability to solve them hisself or hire someone. Nevertheless I see opportunities for in-house staff who are working in parallel roles, to take on LLM coding and offering those owners solutions that they can’t hire, or buy—someone who knows the business and can get things done.
> Perhaps 1% percent of current software engineers of today will be needed in the future when AI code inevitably has the ability to follow good software engineering practice..
So who talks / prompts the agents to do the work - the PM ? he will do his normal job of figma designs, customer strategy , high level requirements etc etc + do all the back and forth and validation with the agent for the actual coding?
Will it be a new type of job or will we still call it a software engineer ? And if its a software engineer why do you determine it is only 1% of current software engineers - and if indeed only 1% then how soon does it happen - will it be in 3 years ? 5 years? 15? Dario said last year that this year maybe 50% of white collar new entries gets decimated. Has it happened? If not why not?
Our predictions currently suck ass. I'm not saying you're wrong - but you could be very early which is almost the same as being wrong. I don't really care if software development as a career collapses in 10 years. I really do care if it happens next year.
"Semaglutide attenuates a proteomics-based dementia risk signature "
ie : clinically meaningless.
The company behind this, Novo Nordisk is increasingly desperate, as tirzepatide destroys the semaglutide revenue stream and the consequent job losses decimate the company
Their operating profit was up 11% on a margin of 44% according to their recent quarterly release, and they beat EPS by 23%. They were in a little trouble in the stock market a few years ago as competitors came online, but they are doing pretty well right now.
They have launched new semaglutide oral products which are growing faster than previous products, and they have multiple drugs in the research pipeline in late phases.
"I have trouble connecting with the thinkers of the Middle Ages. Their thinking seems to me to be frightened, so overcautious, so cramped and circumscribed, I can't read it without sadness"
Completely misses the point of mediaeval philosophy.
As an avowed atheist, I find the works of the Blessed Duns Scotus and St Thomas Aquinas intellectually fascinating.
I don’t think the skill set required to write the Vaswani paper is the same as training and shipping frontier models like Gemini so I am not sure why people keep bringing this up.
Schools for the poorer segments of society keep adding more and more technology, eroding the analytical skills of their students and staff. But the shiny things keep the poorer parents and mediocre teachers happy while keeping down cost per lesson per child. This keeps the administrators happy.
Meanwhile ultra-expensive elite private schools for the children of the Zuckerbergs, Al Sauds, Al Nahyans, where the teachers are Ivy and Oxbridge graduates emphasise tradition, classical studies and analytical skills while relegating technology to a minor role
As always the children of the rich and powerful get bespoke education... You could call it elegant education for a more civilized age...
This was more than a decade ago when we were looking into emersion schools for our daughter. We went to several private schools first and all three were emphasizing ipads as their primary tool for teaching language. The public school our daughter was set to attend had an open house promoting its long running emersion programs.
Wow. Our public school had native speakers and no ipads. There was a major focus on true emersion. From minute one, they were spoken to in the native language. The teachers were incredible. In the first six months, my daughter was speaking in full sentences and her teachers were praising her pronunciation of certain words.
The real eye opener came at a local park. My daughter was playing with a boy, speaking to him and his mother. I came over to join the fun and the mother started speaking to me in Spanish. I was like, "Uh, I don't speak Spanish." She looked at me confused and said, "Your daughter, she was speaking fluently to both myself and my son in Spanish."
It was a pretty jaw dropping moment. One, to think we were blessed to have such a great emersion program at our public school and secondly to see my daughter pick up a language so effortlessly. It really reinforced my idea that its all about the quality of education, not necessarily how much you're paying for it.
This is incredible to hear! My gf has had similar stories about kids coming into her program with zero English, often with parents that have little to no English, and within a short amount of time becoming conversationally fluent and translating for their mom and dad.
> But the shiny things keep the poorer parents and mediocre teachers happy while keeping down cost per lesson per child.
Baltimore spends more per student than Switzerland.
> As always the children of the rich and powerful get bespoke education... You could call it elegant education for a more civilized age...
Education for more affluent people is often cheaper per student. The benefit richer students have is that, on average, their parents are smarter, more conscientious, etc.
> Education for more affluent people is often cheaper per student.
A lot of this is accounting.
You don't need to buy chromebooks for pupils when they already bring their own tablets/laptops. It's not unheard that if there is some initiative requiring equipment (music, sports, smartboards) parents fund that initiative outside tuition costs.
Private schools tend to be controlled-admission and controlled-admission schools can have much narrower variance in skill level. The "dumb" kids do not swallow attention of the teacher and the "super-smart" kids do not get neglected. Richer parents can afford private tutors, closing the gap even further. On top of that, they tend to afford more time to coach their children in the right direction.
All of that costs a small fortune, but is not visible if you compare total state funding of public schools versus admission / tuition costs.
I went to chicago public schools and Google gave every kid in the district free chromebooks. So inner city schools dont need to buy chromebooks for their students either it turns out. They were also terrible and pretty much only served to distract
I would avoid phrasing it as "better". Less wealthy parents are likely working more hours, have to spend more time on household maintenance (don't have a cleaner, can't afford grocery delivery), not to mention the overwhelming stress of struggling to make ends meet. It's not exactly a level playing field.
> I would avoid phrasing it as "better". Less wealthy parents are likely working more hours, have to spend more time on household maintenance (don't have a cleaner, can't afford grocery delivery), not to mention the overwhelming stress of struggling to make ends meet. It's not exactly a level playing field.
Sure, and all of that was included in my comment. It's definitely not a judgement of parents, I am one and it's incredibly difficult even with our relatively high incomes.
> Less wealthy parents are likely working more hours
The top income decile in the U.S. works 10% more hours than the bottom decile. Only a bit over half of low-income kids live in a household where a parent works full time.
I also wonder how it accounts for salaried vs hourly - I work "40 hours" each week but I know that isn't a consistent 40, it's typically less and sometimes more, but I'm always getting paid a set wage whereas an hourly worker is getting paid exactly what they work (barring wage theft that's more common in lower-income jobs)
The Rotchschilds, the Rockefellers, and the Du Ponts would have done very well in life just as well had they went to public schools, while the alumni of Baltimore public school would not become Rotschilds and Rockefellers and Zuckerbergs had they gone to Pillips Exeter.
In many things with regards to education you're not paying/applying for a better quality system in and of itself, but for better quality peers. A public school with a e.g. Exeter quality class would have phenomenal results. By contrast an average public high school class at Exeter is going to have mediocre results. We even tested this. Around COVID many top universities rolled back their testing requirements for admittance under an equity based argument. Those universities are now mostly rolling back those decisions because they found that being less selective in enrollment resulted in significantly worse outcomes. Not exactly a surprise, well at least it shouldn't be.
I don't know how the US works, but in the UK public (private...) schools have incredible facilities for sports, the arts, personal lessons and tutoring, and so on.
Meanwhile the state sector has a lot of crumbling buildings and hand-me-down textbooks.
Public school kids still manage to screw up but they're more likely to land on their feet. Access to the upper levels in careers like law and finance is very much about "polish" (cultural identity) although working class kids sometimes gain entry, often as charity cases.
At the same time public schools used to be notorious for brutal bullying. So survivors are often emotionally traumatised and have had empathy beaten out of them.
In the US public (US terminology) schools are quite well funded, contrary to what many think. We recently hit a record of just under $18k per student per year for high schools. [1] I went to school in some quite low income areas, and the facilities were great. The big issue is that much of the student body was not.
So the facilities, textbooks, and so on were regularly vandalized, stolen, or simply destroyed. But nonetheless we had a nice gym, auditorium, track/field, and so on. We even had things like laser disc players back when that was pretty bleeding edge. In modern times I'd expect to see various luxuries like 3d printers and stuff like that even at low income schools in the US, at least if they haven't been stolen or [intentionally] broken.
If I had to choose for my children between Exeter peers at a US public school, or US public school peers at Exeter, it wouldn't be even remotely close.
You are dramatically mistaken about the funding and education quality for low-income school districts. You might find some with good sports facilities, probably from a grant from an outside organization or local college, but anything related to academics, facilities, counseling… forget it. Most public school teachers have to buy their own classroom supplies That is fucked up. I’ve seen districts that don’t have enough available cash to buy food to give everybody a lunch. In one school, a teacher got very sick — they didn’t have enough money to pay a sub, and there wasn’t any other class being taught that we could have been folded into… oh well! Just sit in the library for that period, and everybody gets an A for the year.
My childhood was split between a low income district and an upper-middle-class district. Neither sets of children were likely to vandalize a goddamned thing. In the low-income district, the vibe was militaristic. We were expected to sit with backs straight and our hands folded when not writing. We moved in orderly single-file lines between classrooms and had to line up in formation outside before we were allowed recess. The education was extremely basic. The 5th grade students were barely on ‘chapter books.’ Science class was rote memorization of extremely basic physical science with no experimentation except for one class, the highlight of the year, where we each got a AA battery, two wires, ands a light bulb and had to go through a prescribed set of “experiments” where we would put the wires in various, obviously wrong configurations and finally make a circuit. Art class was still macaroni collages and music class was zero-education sing-alongs from the same song book they used in the 60s. In the upper-middle-class district we were reading Greek mythology and pulling out philosophical themes, exploring people’s emotional motivations, and exploring the historical context. Took pictures with cameras obscura that we made ourselves, made our own Leyden jars and did some very well-designed and open-ended experiments. Art was mostly graphite work from “drawing on the right side of the brain“ where we discussed things like negative space, and we made simple pottery in the school’s ceramic studio.
To imply it was the fault of the student body of that low-income school district that they might have been less engaged or have worse outcomes in life is fucking bananas. Gather more information before making these sweeping generalizations.
You're speaking of elementary which I can't say much one way or the other about in part because I remember things as a child would - I didn't have a 'mature' understanding of what was happening around me back then - I've also never looked up the data on it. I'm referring to middle/high school. And there at least, anything remotely like what you're describing would be highly atypical.
As for the data I've already cited the $18k spent per student which also leads to another common misconception. Low income schools receive more average public funding than high income schools, thanks to various redistributionary measures. Similarly for things like vandalism, 67% of schools report file at least one criminal report on property crime per year. [1] The most common rate is 3-5 per year, followed by 6-10 per year. And that dramatically understates the rates, because most things, as in the vastly overwhelming majority, are not criminally reported.
You can’t make those funding generalizations because the end amount that schools spend on students is defined locally. I just looked in the Massachusetts school funding database. The town I’m not going to out myself as having attended spent ten thousand dollars per year less per student than the Upper-Middle-Class Weston, and the fantastically expensive Cambridge spent 7k per student more than that annually.
Local taxes are where much funding comes from but the redistributionary measures come from both the state and Federal in 'normal' funding as well as a wide array of various program based funding, like Title 1 at the Federal Level. This is why looking up the total amount spent per student is a bit trickier than it might seem. This [1] paper breaks down all funding, with details by state. Check out page 23. So for instance in Massachusetts high poverty districts receive the highest public funding by an very wide margin, with $27,468/student contrasted against a statewide average of $21,767.
What your experience may reflect is more of a rural/urban divide rather than poor/rich. If you happened to live in a low income rural area with few minorities, then your public funding is going to be much less than an urban school with more minorities. You also need to account for basic cost differences, which is going to be factored into redistributionary measures. A dollar goes way further in rural areas than it does urban, which yet further reduces the amount of funding that rural areas receive. Finally schools with higher minority populations tend to have worse outcomes (higher crime, lower scores, etc) which means by the inverse you also receive less funding if you have fewer minorities.
There's even a hint of this possibility in the data. In Massachusetts, the highest poverty districts do indeed receive, by an overwhelming margin, the most funding. But the second group with high levels of 'mid poverty' receives the lowest funding amongst all 4 groups. The data doesn't specify, but I'd expect that this group is significantly comprised of rural and low minority populations.
You’re trying to make conclusions about local situations using federal funding data. No matter how many words you type about it, your approach is fundamentally inadequate and you’re making sweeping generalizations based on it. I’m out. Have a nice day.
That's not federal funding data. The paper provides specific numbers on the total funding including local, state, and federal. Looking only at local funding, as you likely did, is completely misleading.
Education is essential in general. But as far as the classic definition of "success" is concerned (usually revolving around wealth of some kind), education is like luck. It could make the difference between 2 people in otherwise identical situations and status. But education alone sadly has a vanishingly small chance of competing with "old money" and generations of accumulated wealth and influence.
There is absolutely no evidence this is true. There are always a few first generation talents who build empires from dirt and nothing (for values of nothing that usually include war, grift, and slavery).
But once an empire is established it becomes largely self-sustaining, and the inheritors get a huge head start over everyone else in their cohort.
Inherited wealth is not self-sustaining at all: if you spend it down, it disappears. Most inheritors of large windfalls will not manage to pass down that wealth in turn; it takes a rare ingrained cultural attitude to make it genuinely "self-sustaining", and even then that really means leaving the wealth as it is and managing it well - not using it to pursue any immediate "head start" in living standards over your peers.
The public schools in at least my corner of Switzerland are better than the private schools, including Le Rosey. This seems to be the opinion of nearly everyone I have met.
> Education in public schools has turned into AI slop being generated by poorly educated teachers.
Sure, because no one (in government or school admin) wants to spend the money on more teachers. I also take issue with "poorly educated" - the teachers I know have a masters in education, but that only goes so far when you're dealing with an overcrowded and underfunded classroom.
Prior to her current role my gf spent about a decade as the head of a very elite private elementary school (she's been in education for 35 years now). Certainly ten figure families represented in the student body with names you would recognize as such. The school had access to all of the resources they could ask for and they did very well on paper. However, the attitude of the students was qualitatively different (and in my gf's opinion much worse) than those of her current students.
It's fun to imagine a collection of rock star educators huddled around every child just constantly feeding their intellectual curiosity, but the reality is most of those kids just aren't hungry. They live lives of comfortable inconsequentiality which, on average, seems to rob something from human curiosity and drive.
I have some cousins (on the wealthier branch of the family) who were the "middle class" students at a school like that. Their dad was a specialist doctor who made a fair amount of money as an expert witness in trials. They came out of it extremely hungry to reach the socioeconomic class of their peers. One is an orthopedic surgeon who did her fellowship in snow sports injuries in Vail, and one is starting his Wharton MBA in the fall.
Meanwhile other relatives who went to good public schools came out of it with a thirst for knowledge and have had eclectic careers with degrees earned out of personal interest, and are happily living middle class lives in midsize cities.
> As always the children of the rich and powerful get bespoke education... You could call it elegant education for a more civilized age...
The rich and powerful pay "fuck you" money for their kids to get the best pre-college educations possible. It takes an incredible amount of willpower for a world-class teacher to say no to that type of money over even high-paying private schools.
Keeping down cost per child? What are you talking about? The cost per child has skyrocketed in the US over last 20 years, particularly among the worst-performing schools. Baltimore spends more per child than Mountain View. NYC spends more per child than Palo Alto.
There is a certain view, popular among many people, that poor performing schools perform badly because they are underfunded. It has been vigorously spread by politicians, teachers, and activists. Well, we ran the experiment. With enormous federal and state spending, we managed to mostly equalize the spending, and, in many cases, fund the badly performing schools more than the good ones. The results of the experiment are very clear: additional funding, by and large, does not *cause* significantly improved educational outcomes. Any observed correlation between school funding and outcomes is a result of who lives in the area, and who attends the school. The casual arrow does not go from funding to outcomes, but from the school population to both funding, and, in parallel, to outcomes.
Increased funding did improve educational outcomes. It just didn't improve it enough to be considered worthwhile.
The fact is that educational outcomes are caused by a large number of variables. Areas with (historically) poorer schools have less competent (or more corrupt) administrations so money doesn't go as far. Even with good leadership at the top (superintendent or public school committee), if the source of that money is not something you can rely on consistently enough to pay salaries with then you are not going to see significant changes.
Pre-K education is also critical to determining later school performance, as knowing the alphabet and numbers are practically assumed by kindergarten curriculums as they are covered far too far to be more than a review. But we have not tried that yet, so we'll see if that pans out...
Enormous federal and state spending on what, by whom, directed by whom, for whose financial benefit?
The results of the experiment aren't clear at all. Increased spending as was done here hasn't had good results. That's not an argument against spending, it's an argument for understanding why it didn't work, and what could be done about it.
We have data on this too. If, instead of spending at large, you look at spending on any specific thing (school lunches, after school classes, teacher wages, materials, classroom aids, electronic equipment, facilities, etc), you find the exact same thing: nothing we have tried so far has made any significant difference. The proponents of increased school spendings are completely blind to empirics, and their only answer to that is “we just need to spend even more”.
I suspect one of the big advantages that money brings to the kids of the rich is to have not only one-on-one education, but also the best-of-the-best in each subject.
That said:
> classical studies
While this may be the "cornerstone of an elite higher education" as Wikipedia calls it, IMO (like studying Shakespeare[0]) I'm not convinced it is a productive use of time.
Don't get me wrong, nerd out about anything you like, but a lot of the world shifted since then. The overlap between what you learn from studying people who thought the sun was a chariot drawn over the sky by magic horses and that the Sahara was caused by some idiot driving them wrong, and what you need to know to deal with a highly connected globally integrated supply chain, is not exactly zero; but childhood is limited and you are likely better off focusing on what's actually in the modern world.
That said, of the few ways it is still useful is likely as shibboleth for the powerful to know one another.
[0] Shakespeare's closer to us than the ancient Greeks and Romans, of course, but still a very different world, the plot of e.g. Merchant of Venice just can't happen today. Plus he was seen as merely "good" rather than "the best"[1] within his own life, was clearly reworking other older tales for his audience[2], his plays were his era's version of somewhere between MCU, a soap opera, and stand up: the goal was bums on seats not high art, it was watched by a broad audience including normal people not just the era's version of evening-wear, crowd participation was a thing, actors would need to be reminded their lines in the middle, etc.
> The overlap between what you learn from studying people who thought the sun was a chariot drawn over the sky by magic horses and that the Sahara was caused by some idiot driving them wrong, and what you need to know to deal with a highly connected globally integrated supply chain, is not exactly zero.
The classical epics speak of heroism and virtue. Understanding certain human morality which is timeless is very useful.
It's not like education in practical domains like CS or supply chain are highly efficient either. Something which forms your outlook is important. While most of the modern literature is not that influential, kids should read the Iliad, Odyssey and Havamal.
Value in knowing that virtue ethics is a thing, yes, but also value in knowing how it compares with consequentialism and deontology.
Classical heroes are not generally good people in the modern sense; they are powerful people. Think The Boys and Watchmen rather than by Marvel and DC. Even supposedly anti-hero modern characters like The Punisher and Deadpool are closer to/less far from the modern understanding of heroism than the ancient heroes are. Though I guess James Bond would be about right, he's a lot more like the classical heroes in that he's generally misogynistic and his violence is directed at The Other, with Q serving in the role of Hermes giving Perseus winged sandals, a sword, and a cap of invisibility.
(Was I taught this in school? No. Did I have the kind of mother who kept some runic divination books around even though I was theoretically being raised Catholic and going to church in part because the best local school was a Catholic school, and thereby teach myself to read the inscription around the outside of the dustcover of the first edition of The Hobbit? Yes).
> Classical heroes are not generally good people in the modern sense; they are powerful people.
I think it's more apt to say that classical heroes were envisioned as 'real' people. While I think almost all people are inherently moral, nobody is "good" in the way that we often like to portray - it's a facade. That facade did not exist in the past, and I think it makes the works consequently much more human in nature.
IMO study whatever you like, no? For me being deeply immersed in a topic that doesn't 1:1 translate to an improvement on the CV is its own pleasure. This way I get to read (complex stuff) for pleasure because it isn't connected to the career hamster-wheel. There is no pressure, while at the same time directly improving my foundation - whether that is Philosophy, pure Math or niche-History does it matter?
> better off focusing on what's actually in the modern world.
I give the elevator pitch version, people respond as if I've not given it any thought at all, so I might as well add a few more words in the first version so I don't have to reply with a metaphorical eye-roll.
> this might change your mind: https://www.suhrkamp.de/rights/book/andreas-reckwitz-loss-fr... (If you only want to study what's actually happening in the modern world, this is the one that explains the loss from Modernity through a sociological lense)
Thanks for the link, but I already have quite a lot on my to-read list.
> I recall N.N. Taleb also making some good points about why to read books that have stood the test of time rather than a best-seller.
If you want to effectively acquire a broad understanding of the human condition as it has been understood throughout history, the great books of the classical tradition (including, yes, myths and fables that talk about e.g. the sun being driven across the sky by magic horses!) will do a far better job of that than just about anything that was written in the 20th or 21st centuries. Young kids have the kind of cognitive development that's required to make good progress on that, while they would be very limited wrt. understanding anything other than the very basics of math and science.
Well, wine is a beverage and feces and vomit are not, so no, that wouldn't be appropriate. There are certainly conversations where discussing perfume, feces, and vomit in the same sentence would be reasonable.
The thread wasn't about picking berries, it was about harvesting food from nature:
> it's a marvelous thing for food to just be out there in the wild for the taking.
Your personal insecurities and hangups about exposure to where your food comes from doesn't make shooting, cleaning, and eating a deer irrelevant. There's a reason grocery stores exist, it's so that.people like you don't need to think about cleaning meat, but that doesn't mean others can't discuss it.
If this bothers you so much, you might enjoy spending time instead on facebook or reddit, where you can easily ensure you are not exposed to concepts you personally find revolting.
Ah yes, the relaxing, meditative joy of killing things in cold blood. Nothing brings you closer to nature than watching the fur and blood fly. Inner peace coming right up ...
Part of that is right. Hunters, as a group, are closer to nature than most. Thanks to them, all kinds of conservation efforts have been started and maintained.
Ever wonder how Nixon was able to establish the EPA and sign into law the clean air act, the clean water act, the marine mammal protection act, the legacy of parks program, and the endangered species act when the green movement was (and is) mostly associated with left-leaning activists? Hunters. They were a big part of the conservative base and provided cover for Nixon and his conservation efforts.
I don't mean to be a jerk about this, but if you ever find an owl pellet and pull it apart, you'll be able to see the exact number and species of small animals it ate the previous night.
Owls spit out roughly one pellet a day.
Meditating on what this means will bring you closer to nature, although one of the primary benefits of this closeness tends to be gratitude that we can engage with nature on our own terms.
Contribute = Human ideas, testing, review etc.
The monkey part of writing code by hand = obsolete.
Do you still write code without and IDE? you remember all the programming language words? everything? you use stackoverflow? it's called evolution, btw:
AI full disclosure
This software is developed with strong assistance from Cursor, Grok 4.5, GPT 5.6, and Claude Fable 5, with humans leading the ideas, testing, and debugging. We say this openly because it shaped how the project was built. If you are not happy with AI-developed code, this software is not for you. The acknowledgement below is equally important: this would not exist without llama.cpp and GGML, largely written by hand.
IKEA furniture embodies many elements of good cabinet making but skips many nonessential elements. And does this more consistently than cabinet makers who can be bored, incompetent, depressed, burnt out, resentful, tired, having a bad day.
In the future AI code inevitably will embody most good software engineering practices. And will do this more consistently than software engineers who can be bored, incompetent, depressed, burnt out, resentful, tired, having a bad day.
Just look at the messages on HN or around you at your colleagues to see how mediocre the average software engineer is..
Today's IKEA is good enough for most people.
Tomorrow's AI coding will be good enough for most corporations.
Good enough to vastly reduce the need for fine craftsmen and women / software engineers.
Good enough to deskill those who call themselves cabinet makers / senior software engineers. These days the cabinet makers I personally know just do contract kitchens for project builders.
But IKEA is and AI will be, bad enough that at the high end with special requirements / taste / money / an inflated sense of self worth, some furniture makers still exist and thrive.
Perhaps 1% percent of current software engineers of today will be needed in the future when AI code inevitably has the ability to follow good software engineering practice.......
And as usual it will mainly be the mediocrities that remain ( so there is hope for you too ), with occasional islands of excellence.