Coronavirus is not mentioned, but had some impact on the travel industry as well.

Tbh I don't think travel agents are done yet, was in my local mall this weekend and it was interesting to see how many people sat at the travel agent desks (but mostly older people, so the days are still probably counted for travel agents).

Reading the article, the author doesn't actually define the work of either.

A travel agent's job is very specific. Plan travel, buy tickets, help make decisions. With the internet, that job is no longer important.

If someone can define a developer's job and how a regular Joe can do all those things, thatll be helpful.

The other move is to broaden. If you're a backend engineer who's always avoided frontend, now's the time - agents can bridge the gap while you learn. If you're frontend-only, lean into backend, devops, infrastructure. The engineers I see thriving are the ones who can own an entire problem end-to-end, not just their slice of it. The generalist travel agents got wiped out, but the generalist engineers - the ones who can move across the stack - are more valuable than ever.

Anecdotally this is what is happening and I see it the 15 years i have been at my current job and the 25 I've been in Corporate IT. As budgets shift the focus is on people in IT understanding more and more while automation (LLM) taking more and more. You are expected to be a full stack dev IMHO. It could be python. It could be java. But you're expected to know it all.

Same shit, different model. Everyone was certain GPT 4 would upend all software development, then Llama, then Claude. Now it looks like the author is freaking out about a new one. Ultimately, real software output hasn't changed noticeably in the last 3 years.