First, They Came for the Software Engineers

The doomsayers treat the amount of software development as zero-sum, so that the more code AI writes the fewer developers will be needed. I think this won't be the case from two directions.

Looking back at all software that already exists, there is often a tremendous backlog of opportunities for performance improvements, reliability improvements, bugfixes, etc. that just never gets worked on due to resources. AI can be turned loose on this and it will get done. Most would never happen otherwise. This includes all kinds of useful but abandoned OSS projects - barrier will be lowered to fork or jump in as a new maintainer.

Looking forward, new projects that would never be attempted due to cost of development are now possible, and will be rewarding businesses. The lower economics of development will open up a tremendous set of new opportunities.

I think the number of lines written per developer and number of lines overall will both vastly increase and not so much at the expense of all the current software engineers.

But compilers write 99.99% of all machine code in production. We should be out of a job, right.

Wildest part of this paradigm is that 'They' is also software engineers.