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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

I think this will result in classic Jevons paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox . As the price of writing any individual function/feature goes down, the demand for software will go up exponentially. Think of how many smallish projects are just never started these days because "software engineers are too expensive".

I don't think software engineers will get much cheaper, they'll just do a lot more.

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I'm guessing low expertise programmers whose main contribution was googling stackoverflow will get less valuable, while high expertise programmers with real design skill will become even more valuable.

I'm both of those things, what happens to my value?

Your legs will have to move faster than your arms.

Sonic the Hedgehog's employment prospects are looking up.

It goes up/down

unfortunately companies don't make interviewing for real design skills a priority. you'll get weeded out because you forgot how to do topographical sort

Hopefully tools like this will finally pursuade companies that being able to do leetcode from memory is not a skill they need.

With AI now they are on your level. It equalizes.

Googling Stackoverflow itself can sometimes be a high expertise skill, simply because sometimes you need a fairly good understanding of your issue to figure out what to search for. A recent example: we had an nginx proxy set up to cache API POST requests (don't worry - they were idempotent, but too big for a query string), and nginx sometimes returned the wrong response. I'm pretty sure I found most of the explanation on Stackoverflow, but I didn't find a question that directly addressed the issue, so Googling was a challenge. You can keep your job finding answers on Stackoverflow of you are good at it.

Certainly but the higher expertise isn't a requirement for most dev jobs I would argue; If you are developing custom algorithm and advanced data structure, you are probably in the fringe of what the dev world do.

Otherwise I am struggling explaining why there is such a great demand for devs that short courses (3-6 months) are successful, the same courses that fail at teaching the fundamental of computing.

Guessing that if all you have to do is keep your metrics green, they are not selecting for the skills they are educating for.

> Think of how many smallish projects are just never started these days because "software engineers are too expensive".

Maybe many. If the cost/benefit equation doesn't work, it makes no sense to do the project.

> I don't think software engineers will get much cheaper, they'll just do a lot more.

If they do more for the same cost, they are cheaper. You as a developer will be earning less in relation to the value you create.

> You as a developer will be earning less in relation to the value you create.

Doesn't matter as long as I create 5x value and earn 2x for it. I still am earning double within the same time and effort.

> If they do more for the same cost, they are cheaper. You as a developer will be earning less in relation to the value you create.

Welcome to the definition of productivity increases, which is the only way an economy can increase standard of living without inflation.

Inflation and productivity might be correlated but neither is a function of the other. Given any hypothetical world where increased productivity leads to inflation, there's a corresponding world equal in all respects except that the money supply shrinks enough to offset that inflation.

Oh now I see! This is how we will enter a new era of ‘code bloat’ - Moore’s law applied to software - where lines of code double every 18 months-

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