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

10 points _pdp_ | 2 comments | 29 Aug 25 14:43 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

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?

1. toomuchtodo ◴[29 Aug 25 15:00 UTC] No.45065036[source]▶
Lines of code is a poor metric for productivity, revenue, and profit. The question is: is AI making existing developer populations more efficient to where the demand trajectory for software engineers declines over time. I think we're too early to tell and that early indicators are the unsophisticated in power going "Magic robot makes you work better, use magic robot or we will replace you, and we're not going to hire materially more people until we approach what appears to be a failure mode." Bit of a collective industry death march based on vibes and cargo culting.
replies(1): >>45065091 #
2. _pdp_ ◴[29 Aug 25 15:04 UTC] No.45065091[source]▶
I agree and I think short term companies will most likely reduce their developer count because AI seems to be cheaper. However, as more code is written by AI the demand for more software will increase therefore the demand for developers will increase.

Of course I am not entertaining the idea of AGI because at that point it will no longer matter as much but if we assume that AI will improve but still require human resourcing the demand for these resources will increase. Don't you think?

This is what makes sense to me at least.