Broadly agree. Whether or not it is useful isn't really an interesting discussion, because it so clearly is useful. The more interesting question is what it does to supply and demand. If the past is any indication, I think we've seen that lowering to barrier to getting software shipped and out the door (whether it's higher level languages, better tooling) has only made demand greater. Maybe this time it's different because it's such a leap vs an incremental gain? I don't know. The cynical part of me thinks that software always begets more software, and systems just become ever more complex. That would suggest that our jobs are safe. But again, I don't say that with confidence.
> If the past is any indication, I think we've seen that lowering to barrier to getting software shipped and out the door (whether it's higher level languages, better tooling) has only made demand greater.
Something I think about a lot is the impact of open source on software development.
25 years ago any time you wanted to build anything you pretty much had to solve the same problems as everyone else. When I went to university it even had a name - the software reusability crisis. At the time people thought the solution was OOP!
Open source solved that. For any basic problem you want to solve there are now dozens of well tested free libraries.
That should have eliminated so many programming jobs. It didn't: it made us more productive and meant we could deliver more value, and demand for programmers went up.
I don't think it's necessarily any larger of a leap than any of the other big breakthroughs in the space. Does writing safe C++ with an LLM matter more than choosing Rust? Does writing a jQuery-style gMail with an LLM matter more than choosing a declarative UI tool? Does adding an LLM to Java 6 matter more than letting the devs switch to Kotlin?
Individual developer productivity will be expected to rise. Timelines will shorten. I don't think we've reached Peak Software where the limiting factor on software being written is demand for software, I think the bottlenecks are expense and time. AI tools can decrease both of those, which _should_ increase demand. You might be expected to spend a month outputting a project that would previously have taken four people that month, but I think we'll have more than enough demand increase to cover the difference. How many business models in the last twenty years that weren't viable would've been if the engineering department could have floated the company to series B with only a half dozen employees?
What IS larger than before, IMO, is the talent gap we're creating at the top of the industry funnel. Fewer juniors are getting hired than ever before, so as seniors leave the industry due to standard attrition reasons, there are going to be fewer candidates to replace them. If you're currently a software engineer with 10+ YoE, I don't think there's much to worry about - in fact, I'd be surprised if "was a successful Software Engineer before the AI revolution" doesn't become a key resume bullet point in the next several years. I also think that if you're in a position of leadership and have the creativity and leadership to make it work, juniors and mid-level engineers are going to be incredibly cost effective because most middle managers won't have those things. And companies will absolutely succeed or fail on that in the coming years.
