Ignore the Grifters – AI Isn't Going to Kill the Software Industry

I've been trying to put this effect into words for a while, now I don't have to - this is really clearly stated:

"AI tools create a significant productivity boost for developers. Different folks report different gains, but most people who try AI code generation recognize its ability to increase velocity. Many people think that means we’re going to need fewer developers, and our industry is going to slowly circle the drain.

This view is based on a misunderstanding of why people pay for software. A business creates software because they think that it will give them some sort of economic advantage. The investment needs to pay for itself with interest. There are many software projects that would help a business, but businesses aren’t going to do them because the return on investment doesn’t make sense.

When software development becomes more efficient, the ROI of any given software project increases, which unlocks more projects. [...] Cheaper software means people are going to want more of it. More software means more jobs for increasingly efficient software developers."

It's beneficial for executives to say AI will kill the software industry, it's a way to stoke fear in workers and a convenient way to say "with AI you could be x more productive," which makes the expectation that the worker should be however many times more productive than they already are, with or without AI "help". This is an attempt to increase hours worked at the same wages, which is itself an attempt to lower wages.

While I found myself in furious agreement with the section titled "Jevons Paradox", I'm less convinced by this argument from the "Comparative Advantage" section:

"While AI is powerful, it’s also computationally expensive. Unless someone decides to rewrite the laws of physics, there will always be a limit on how much artificial intelligence humanity can bring to bear."

The cost for running a prompt through the best-available model has collapsed over the past couple of years. GPT-4o is about 100x times less expensive than GPT-3 was, and massively more capable.

DeepSeek v3 and R1 are priced at a fraction of OpenAI's current prices for GPT-4 and o1 model and appear to be highly competitive with them.

I don't think we've hit the end of that trend yet - my intuition is that there's a lot more performance gains still to be had.

I don't think LLM systems will be competitive with everything that humans can do for a long time, if ever. But for the things they CAN do the cost is rapidly dropping to almost nothing.

i agree that the industry wont be killed, but I do have some worries about what the future will look like.

- If we keep making AI-assistance tools that make mid- and senior-level ICs more and more efficient, where does that leave entry-level junior positions? It's already tough enough for juniors to get a foot in the door, but will it get even harder as we continue to make the established older devs more and more efficient?

- The current crop of AI-assistance tools are being tailored to meet the needs of mid- and senior-level ICs that learned programming in a pre-AI world. But incoming junior devs are "AI native" and may approach software development in a very different way.

- I would wager that there will be substantial workplace/generational divides between devs that learned programming before using AI assistance later vs "AI native" devs that had AI assistance the whole time. I have no idea what these new ways of working will be, but I'm curious to see how it plays out.

I remember when Hinton said that that we should "stop training radiologists now" in 2016[1]. Meanwhile, radiologists are in high demand and are getting paid better than ever. I believe the same will be true for programmers in the future. Sure, some of the boilerplate will be handled for you, just like segmentation is for radiologists. That's great for everyone.

1 = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HMPRXstSvQ&t=30s

I am quite tired of seeing titles like this. No, you _don't know_. Vast majority of definitive statements like this is going to be meaningless. The whole point about this is that it's an uncertainty, the impact of AI on our society is unpredictable, you could be right, but you could be wrong too. And merely assigning a probability to this is going to be very non-trivial.

I just can't understand where people find the kind of confidence to say AI is (or is not) going to <insert your scenario here>.

AI is going to make building software way cheaper and more profitable, but that's actually bad news for a lot of developers out there. Think about how many people are only employed because they know the basics of React or Django or whatever. They can copy-paste code and tweak existing patterns, but that's exactly what AI is getting really good at.

The developers who are actually going to thrive are the ones who can architect complex systems and solve gnarly technical problems. That stuff is getting more valuable, not less.

But a lot of folks have built careers on pretty basic skills. They've gotten by because there just aren't many humans who can do even simple technical work. That advantage is disappearing fast.

What we are currently calling AI is just a fancy programming language/REPL/compiler anyway, so obviously software developers aren't going away any time soon. You fundamentally must be a software developer to use these tools.

Elevator operators never went away either. In fact, there have never been more elevator operators in human history! Not a good career choice, though. That is what these warnings, realistic or not, are actually calling attention to.

The job of "software engineer" as we know it will end.

Before the industrial revolution, shoemakers would make shoes. It was a specialized skill, meaning shoes were very expensive, so most people couldn't afford them.

Then factories were invented. Now shoes could be made cheaply and quickly, by machines, so more people could afford them. This meant that far more people could be employed in the shoe industry.

But those people were no longer shoemakers. Shoemakers were wiped out overnight.

Think of how huge the shoe industry is now. There are jobs ranging from factory worker to marketing manager. But there are zero shoemakers.

AI writing software doesn't mean it's the end of the industry. Humanity will benefit greatly, just like we did from getting cheaper shoes.

But the software engineers are screwed.

Working with nontechnical people make prompts is interesting.

I’m seeing a lot of frustration with people dealing with markdown. Even though it’s free form and not really like code at all the hashes, dashes etc throw them off

Also seeing a lot of people having a hard time expressing their desired behavior in a concrete way. It reminds me in 3rd grade when we had to write recipes and then the teacher had a classmate maliciously comply to only what was written.

Overall I think tools will improve and barriers will continue to disappear but for the time being still has big demand for people to convert abstract intention to concrete machine usable format. It’s just how those ideas are expressed get more flexible with llms

"Cheaper software means people are going to want more of it. More software means more jobs for increasingly efficient software developers. Economists call this Jevons Paradox."

If we accept there will be increased demand for software, it's a big jump from that to concluding the efficiency of AI will be outpaced by the demand for software, specifically along the dimension of required developers.

Software isn't wheat or fuel, it can be reused and resold.

“Crack the books”—can anybody recommend good books for this shared future of ours? I’m tired of trying to piece it together from blog posts, READMEs, and short video tutorials.

> Cheaper software means people are going to want more of it.

This is the key insight.

Most software today is built for the common user (individual, business, etc.).

With the cost of writing curly braces and semi-colons dropping drastically, we’ll actually see an increase in the number of programmers worldwide.

This will come at some cost; your average Wordpress agency will need to evolve or get eaten, similarly so if you primarily build CRUD apps.

As more software is written, the upper bound should also go higher. Great engineers will be greater, both in capability and compensation.

LLMs are the new compiler, and the world of software is going to get a lot more bespoke.

Thank you for this article, I really needed a positivity boost today.

It's a great reminder to not only consider what wonderful things could happen in the future, but also to want them and work towards them. Clarifying a positive future like this helps others consider it, want it, and make it happen.

I understand the case being made is more of a prediction than a wish, but it's also a vision. I believe clarifying a vision makes it more likely to happen, especially when people gravitate to it.

There is plenty of negativity already. Thanks again for the positive outlook.

AI is going to create more work for software developers, in the shorter run.

Big efficiency gains motivate the million small steps, planned and muddled through, that it takes to harness the new efficiencies most effectively at scale. Not just somewhere.

But in the long run (where “long” these days can be pretty short) how can generations of improving automated software developers, improving in both quality & capacity, not replace lots of software developers.

> There’s no shortage of people saying “this time it’s different”, but those people have been around for every other major technological advance and they have yet to be correct. I wouldn’t bet on the doomers.

This is not a valid argument. It is logical gibberish.

Let’s prep it for Lean: “many people have been wrong before, let’s call those people “Doomers1”. There are people who disagree with me. Let’s call those people “Doomers2”. Clearly, “Doomers1” = “Doomers2”, proof by similarity of set names. “Doomers1” have been wrong about something before, therefore “Doomers2” will certainly be wrong.

Lean crashes…

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Question: “What software development task is intrinsically human?”

Thought experiment: Could there be alien non-human programmers? Based on silicon instead of carbon, that could ever be better than us?

An argument that software developers cannot be replaced by exponentially scaling and improving learning tech, would have to involve some quite special reasoning.

It would have to tie humans to fundamental math and computing in a way that shook our understanding of all three.

I haven’t seen a study yet that suggests AI tools enhance productivity of developers.

I wouldn’t take it as a given.

The study I have seen was from a company selling AI developer tools whose researchers were employed by said company. Not exactly and independent and bias-free study.

Personally they don’t work for me.

It’s not AI that is going to take out jobs. It’s the capital class that will do that. That’s what is changing the industry.

I suspect this will be the year we start to hear stories of folks getting let go for not using LLM codegen.

AI is not going to kill software industry, but is there still a software industry?

Or, rather, is there any non-software industry left?

I don't buy applying comparative advantage in this case, even after reading the more extended article that was linked to. The argument makes the fundamental assumption that the marginal value of one unit of a specific type of work is fixed. Whatever is the most profitable use case for AGI is the one that all the compute and power will be plowed into.

But what kind of economic activity actually has a fixed marginal utility, no matter how much of that activity there is? I think it's like, none at all? No matter what you're doing, there's eventually going to be diminishing returns as you do more of it. As the highest value use cases are saturated by AGI, the opportunity cost of doing something else diminishes. And comparative advantage only works because of the opportunity cost.

Yeah, I always suspected this. Increased software productivity facilitated by IA would lead to even more and more complex software.

But are we the software workers going to see the results of our increased productivity in our paychecks or are we now on the same boat as the other proletarians that haven't seen their salaries increase in proportion to the increases on their productivities facilitated by automation since the 70s.

Are we going to enter history as the last profession to resist feudalization, the last one who gave a lower class person some chance of upward mobility only to finally be conquered by the power of the ultra-rich?

> Software development has always been a career where you are either learning new things or stagnating. AI doesn’t change the need to keep learning and evolving.

Keep in mind, there are still COBOL developers. If you want to stagnate, there's a market for that.

ChatGPT and similar tools have made getting started programming way more accessible. My girlfriend just learned to program starting a few months ago and I’m constantly impressed what she’s able to do with the help of AI tools.

There's also the effect that reviewing AI generated code is a lot less fun than writing your own code. It becomes more of an admin task, and less of a creative one, thereby attracting less motivated developers.

I think the two different sides of the view is really just a matter of perspective and definition.

Do you view the next evolution of software engineering with AI as still software engineering? Or do you think it's something else that replaces software engineering. Something akin to the Ship of Theseus.

I belong to the replacement camp, but I don't think the underlying thinking differs much. Just a matter of how you look at it.

My personal take: https://github.com/paradite/ai-replace-swe

> While AI is powerful, it’s also computationally expensive. Unless someone decides to rewrite the laws of physics, there will always be a limit on how much artificial intelligence humanity can bring to bear. This means that we’ll eventually allocate our scarce AI resources towards the things they are best at, which leaves plenty of things for humans to do.

Unfortunately, this argument doesn't hold up because of "cheap" models such as Deepseek R1.

If Thing B is better and cheaper than Thing A, people are going to use Thing B until it runs out. Consequently, people are going to make more Thing B. In the short term some jobs are safe only because we don't have enough Thing B, temporarily. But that's not the reason to claim "we are safe don't worry!".

I don't know what the future holds, but developing software in the present is amazing. I've always loved writing software, but I love writing software with AI even more.

All the boring stuff, like converting data from one format to another, is a prompt away. All the annoying scripts you know how to write, but cbf, like conditionally editing files across directories, is a prompt away.

Plus, I feel secure with my AI buddy. It's like having a helpful lead who's always up to help me debug, give me a second opinion, or show me what I'm missing. I feel like I can work in any language I want, and learning new things is so much easier with an AI tutor.

I have to say, it's not every day that you find a well-written article without loads of jargon or clickbait titles full of personal storytelling!

Also all the jobs for replacing unreliable/insecure systems where LLM output is being given wayyy too much trust and system authority.

"When software development becomes more efficient, the ROI of any given software project increases, which unlocks more projects." - this is just wrong. It assumes every company hiring software developers has infinite scope. In reality most companies hire programmers to create something and then scale down and maintain it. (Obviously, there are companies with nearly unlimited scope, but those are usually huge companies).

When some AI can perform the work at 100X the rate of an average developer, you will run out of requirements pretty quickly. You will need 1/100th of developers to oversee the process.

There’s a silent majority not using AI, in many cases actually building complex AI tools and models with many moving parts, with nothing to gain from saying that they’re not using AI. And the grifters have everything to gain by pouncing on anyone commenting that they’re not using AI.

I agree and like this article, but something about calling those that believe otherwise Grifters feels a bit too harsh and polarizing to me. I know some who do believe AI will cause immense software role displacement, and wouldn't label them this way.

For coders/devs --> AI is useful only to novice coders ai give them a basuc core/template code to start with that they can modify

But actual coders who work in companies on projects thay have to follow different styles/languages/algorithm for coding practices, ai cant conform to that , if you are working on legacy codes or refactoring you need to maintain the style and format the code already is in, ai cant give you exact, you cant say ai these is my million line, code scattered on thousand files, analyse and add these feature while maintaining sanctity of current code practice

Ai will just introduce new bugs and you will waste more time in finding and solving

AI gives productivity boost only if you are starting from scratch, it can give you core code / boilerplate to rapidly start with adding features