A.I. Is Coming for the Coders Who Made It

That's true.

> companies won't pay an employee more than the value he can create

True, but the wealthy corporations aren't simply paying for "programmers". Cheap programming labor is available, especially in less wealthy countries, and corporations could avail themselves of that if they wanted (and they sometimes do). When some programmers make more than their peer average, it's because the employers consider those programmers to be "the best", the smartest, most skilled, hardest working, or whatever. In that regard, A.I. is largely irrelevant. The best programmers and the worst programmers can both use A.I., so it's not a distinguishing factor in the labor market. What matters the most is the supply of the type of programmers that companies are seeking.

A.I. might (or might not) increase a company's revenue, but there's no reason the company can't just book that as profit. A.I. doesn't increase the demand for programmers; if anything, it might reduce the demand for programmers, if the programmers they've already hired become more productive. Adding more employees has diminishing returns, as we've seen with mass tech layoffs in recent years. Hiring is not an automatic productivity boost, if you're measuring productivity as an addition to revenue. At the end of the day, producing more stuff doesn't matter unless the company can sell that stuff.

> if a single programmer can generate $500k worth of value

How do you even determine the monetary value produced by a single programmer in a large team effort?

(Ask yourself this: how much "value" is generated by human resources or administrative assistants or janitors? You might say $0, but nonetheless they get paid more than $0, because the work needs to be done. You can't a functional corporation without them. And their compensation is based on supply and demand, not on "value generated".)

Let me put it this way: I used to work for a small company, and some of my coworkers also worked at a BigCo at some point, either before or after SmallCo. Their personal productivity didn't change much over time, from one employer to another, but their employer's revenue per employee changed dramatically from one employer to another. A tech company's revenue depends on many different factors, many of which have nothing to do with the employed programmers.

Let me put it another way: the more that employers rely on publicly available automatated tools—for example, LLMs—rather than on the individual skills of employees to increase productivity, the more the employees themselves become interchangeable cogs in the machine, and thus by supply and demand, their compensation will not increase.

Of course, if using LLMs were an elite skill that required inborn talent and/or years of specialized training, then you would expect LLMs to increase the compensation of those with that unique skill, but I've seen no evidence that this is the case.

For example, with regard to students, it was the mediocre, lazy students who started using ChatGPT to cheat. The good students didn't need it. And as I said, the cheaters are no better off than before. They mistakenly thought they had some completitive advantage, but the same tools were available to everyone.

With regard to engineers, the issue isn't the difference between good engineeres and mediocre engineers. The issue is that all good engineers have access to the same AI. Thus, engineers who were equal to each other before AI are still equal to each other. It's not a competitive advantage over peers, and thus there's no incentive to pay them more. AI doesn't change the supply of good engineers, nor does it give individual good engineers a competitive advantage over other good engineers. Any additional productivity comes more or less for free, because it's due to factors external to the engineer rather than internal to the engineer.