No one is going to hire more developers, that's the entire point of AI. You'll do more work and provide more value to shareholders for the same if not less pay until you're rich enough to escape the hell-cycle of capitalism or you die.
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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?
What I am speculating that we will see is an increasing demand for developers. While AI will be churning more code the work that cannot be done by AI will require more developers overall then ever before.
So if the demand for developers increases at all, that increase will be minimal. And bear in mind that every aspect of every software process will be optimized as much as possible for AI automation, including languages used, so the set of work that "cannot be done by AI" will also be minimized.
Peak coal jobs was in the 1980s but peak output was in the early 2000s, while employment went from 200k to about 75k in that period. Sure, coal might have been cheaper but it didn't translate into more jobs overall.