I haven't seen any affect of AI at the higher end of freelancing -- the polar opposite of Upwork et al. I do see demand for freelancers with skill/experience de

I haven't seen any affect of AI at the higher end of freelancing -- the polar opposite of Upwork et al. I do see demand for freelancers with skill/experience developing LLMs, and integrating them into business systems. If someone wants a logo or a brochure-ware site they can probably put that together with LLM assistance today. If they want to do e-commerce or offer an actual service to paying users maybe they can stumble through prompting an LLM to get something to work. When they get hit with a PCI compliance audit, a hacked server, a huge hosting bill, a corrupt database, they can call me because Copilot and Claude probably won't help them, even if they understood the underlying problem in the first place. I broadly agree that for people who think Upwork represents the freelancing market, they will have even more trouble competing with LLMs than they did with $4/day programmers in Bangladesh and Indonesia. Some people will leave the business, some will complain about it online until they learn the universe doesn't care about fairness, and a few will upgrade to skills they can apply and sell. As of today the so-called AIs can't do much that a serious business will trust. That might change but I think humans still have a long runway to stay ahead of them. When spreadsheets came out early in my career we got lots of talk about how that technology would make entire occupations obsolete -- almost as much as we get today about AI. What actually happened: people who learned how make Excel jump through hoops and add business value became almost layoff-proof, and even today knowing how to work with Excel describes a very valuable job skill. I have survived in the software business for almost five decades, seen the no-code/low-code apocalypse touted multiple times, from way back when "managers" would supposedly use COBOL and SQL to write their own code and query databases. Never happened, not because the tools don't work and add a lot of value, but because very few people can translate vague requirements into something resembling a spec, or a series of prompts, and then also evaluate the result. AI just creates opportunities for people like me, I can mop up the messes until I retire.