> Will this lead to fewer programmers or more programmers?
> Economics gives us two contradictory answers simultaneously.
> Substitution. The substitution effect says we'll need fewer programmers—machines are replacing human labor.
> Jevons’. Jevons’ paradox predicts that when something becomes cheaper, demand increases as the cheaper good is economically viable in a wider variety of cases.
The answer is a little more nuanced. Assuming the above, the economy will demand fewer programmers for the previous set of demanded programs.
However. The set of demanded programs will likely evolve. So to over-simplify it absurdly: if before we needed 10 programmers to write different fibonacci generators, now we'll need 1 to write those and 9 to write more complicated stuff.
Additionally, the total number of people doing "programming" may go up or down.
My intuition is that the total number will increase but that the programs we write will be substantially different.
> now we'll need 1 to write those and 9 to write more complicated stuff.
Or simpler :) I'd argue that in the past we needed more programmers for more complicated stuff (more hand-rolled databases, auth solutions etc. - a lot stuff was reinvented in each company), now we need many more people to glue some libraries and external solutions together.
The future could look similar, a lot of LLM vibe coders and a handful of specialized fixers.
Who knows though. Real life has a lot of inertia. One will probably do just fine writing just enterprise Java or React (or both!) for the next 30 years. I plan to be dead or retired in the next 30 years.
I plan to retire in the next 10-15 years and then 'grudgingly' accept very large checks to teach noobs to be competent enough to replace the recently-retired seniors, since companies are and will continue to, foolishly not hire and develop junior engineers anymore. It seems to me like most firms have almost involuntarily placed an enormous unhedged bet on LLMs being able to do the job of senior and staff software engineers by 2030-2035, which I'd say is certainly a possibility but boy howdy is it going to be an expensive bet to lose if they're wrong.
That's what happened once with PCs in the 80s/90s and then again with the web in the 90s/2000s. The number of developers went up. Maybe the number of developers on the previous technology went down, but I'm not sure about it. Example: there are still developers for Windows native apps. Are they more or less than in 1995? I would bet on less, but I won't bet anything of valuable.
The change in the number working on Windows native apps is probably not that important.
People learn new skills out of interest or opportunity. A lot of people working on Windows native apps started working on web or mobile apps.
Yeah it sounded like Kent just discovered Jevons' paradox and decided to shoehorn it into the article. Nothing here became cheaper, and if by cheaper he means that paying a programmer was more expensive than paying for an AI, even that's not necessarily true once you account for re-work and a host of other things.
If we're going to go with economic/strategy models, I think the Laffer Curve is more relevant. Seriously extrapolating here: AI is optimal for many tasks which if used in those contexts can maximize productivity. Over-using it on unsuitable tasks destroys productivity.
There's something with the same shape as Jevon's paradox - the Peltzman effect. The safer you make something the more risks people will take.
Applied to AI I think it would be something like - ease of development increases the complexity attempted.
This actually sounds like Rust development (or both FP and OOP development before that, or compilers before that).
By making things simpler and/or more robust, you make some very complex algorithms much more feasible. And you end up with algorithms such as HTTPS or even raft being part of everyday life, despite their complexity.
...and complexity created.
I think "How can this code be made simpler and any complexity either isolated or eliminated (preferably eliminated)?" should be the ensuing prompt after we generate things.
This is insightful. Which programs will the new tech make profitable (be it cash, psychic/emotional, or some other form) to write?
The Keynesian bogeyman of the deflationary spiral ignores intertemporal effects. Cell phones and laptops are getting cheaper all the time, but no one drops into an infinite wait because of time-preference. In the context of producing software becoming cheaper, people at a definite point value having a usable system today over a marginally cheaper version tomorrow.
Too much optimism from everyone, the truth is managers and business owners are controlling everything and they always make the dumbest decisions: "Quick fire everyone! dont hire any seniors we can get em cheaper. Dont hire any juniors they cant afford $10,000 graphics cards to already be good at it. Lets create a new system to exploit illegals and churn through them as they get deported, now thats business boyz"