December 27, 2025
Fasten your seatbelts, devs
Travel agents took 10 years to collapse, developers are three years in
AI grabs the easy jobs, bosses freeze hires — will coders be next
TLDR: The post warns software developers may face a rapid shake-up like travel agents as AI spreads and hiring slows. Commenters split between doom about low-skill jobs vanishing and hype about AI super-productivity, with a middle camp betting specialists in complex work will thrive.
The internet KO’d travel agents over a decade, but the comment section says software developers might not get that long. The post compares airline commission cuts (agents lost 60% of revenue in 1995) to today’s hiring chill, with VC money down $150B and AI coding tools everywhere. And the crowd is loud. Doom posters warn we’re living off “information asymmetry” and heading into crushing times. Speed-runners brag they’re shipping in hours what used to take weeks, calling boring dev tasks over. Skeptics clap back with the airline analogy: when you book online, you get a real ticket; when AI codes, who’s checking the fine print?
The flashpoint: LLMs (AI text tools that can write code) went from 0% to 84% adoption among devs by 2025, and over 40% of Americans use them. One side says generalist, low-skill coding is “travel-agented.” The other says complex, messy business work survives—like luxury travel and corporate TMCs did. Jokes fly: “Become a code concierge,” “learn cruises or Kubernetes,” and a link to an earlier thread for more popcorn. The vibe? Panic meets power-up: managers aren’t rehiring, margins are thinning, but the AI-savvy are rebranding as premium, bespoke tech fixers. Choose your lane—upmarket or upskill.
Key Points
- •US travel agents declined from 132,000 to 74,000, retail locations from 34,000 to 13,000, and total jobs fell ~70% by 2021, with the downturn unfolding over roughly a decade.
- •US airlines cut travel agent commissions in 1995, removing a revenue source that had comprised about 60% of agents’ income and causing immediate cashflow strain.
- •Despite a late-1990s uptick due to record travel volumes, online travel agencies in the early 2000s accelerated structural shifts; in 1999, under 5% of travel was booked online.
- •The article argues software engineering is undergoing a faster shift, citing a post-COVID ~$150bn decline in US VC funding and reports of reduced hiring and backfilling by managers and CTOs.
- •LLM adoption has been rapid: GPT-4 enabled serious coding assistance about 2.5 years ago; LLM usage exceeds 40% of the US population; developer LLM adoption rose to 84% by 2025 per Stack Overflow.