Ask HN: Should we stop worrying that AI will replace developer jobs?

Longer title: Should we stop worrying that AI will replace developer jobs and instead start thinking how we are going to hire more developers?

Hi folks,

I can't be the only one noticing that AI coding agents are making us work more, not less.

Here's the math that's been bugging me. If a developer used to write 100 lines of code per day (illustrative) but now AI writes 90% of the code, so you'd think that the load will go down to 10 lines, right? What I find is that the scope has exploded. Developers are now able to crank 1000 lines per day total and while you may say that AI writes 90% of them we are still writing 100 lines of the hard stuff.

Every feature that seemed too expensive before is suddenly doable. Every prototype becomes production system. The bottleneck shifted from typing to thinking, but the thinking load just got 10x bigger. We have also single-handedly increased the demand of that 10% chunk which is not as easy to scale as machines. Am I the only one noticing this?