>5 people over a span of 6 months
As a very seasoned developer, I have seen lots of projects built by a single person in a short time that “would normally” be built with more people over a longer period of time. What is invariably missing from these projects are the very things that the 5 people would have added. The main thing that is usually missing is robustness. These single dev projects will usually fall over hard when they stray from the happy path (why would anyone enter a value other than a small digit for this input???).
Data integrity is often ignored as well, both internal to the application and how the data flows through the rest of the systems and the org as a whole.
Security is generally an afterthought as well.
And then, there’s sort of the elephant in the room, which is part of why these projects take a long time, is that they need to be defined and refined in the first place. It is not uncommon to find some edge case that requires a lot of effort to decide how best to handle it, and it’s often the product owner who needs to decide tradeoffs for thw product.
Incidently many of these reasons are why offshoring also fails.
So, where does that leave things? AI will undoubtedly allow a team of 9 to do what a team of 10 did 2 years ago (maybe even 3 of 5). AI also will potentially help with each of the things I’ve mentioned as well, I’ve had good luck with AI helping with missing test coverage. I’ve also had a lot of luck with AI helping where I have gaps in my knowledge about things. So I expect the quality of software will get much better too.
I will say, right now there is a big shake up of the industry. I expect short term prospects to be bad in the same way the offshoring frenzy of the early 2000s. What you are going to find, is that long term demand for technical talent will only go up. In the same way that efficiency in anything tends to increase demand, things get cheaper and people find more uses for said thing.
Another thing to think about; I sort of saw the writing on the wall 6 years ago. I continually saw the barrier to entry fall in software. So I changed my niche and moved closer to the hardware, where fewer people seemed to be entering. I will tell you that the places LLMs struggle with the most are the places others haven’t spent much time documenting. In the domain I currently work, it is impossible to use any code auto generation, there are too many places it transposes things or makes up api calls. But the code it generates can be very useful when the documentation is ambiguous and some obscure forums post likely has an answer the LLM can draw from. So it is possible to stay ahead of AI by moving to the fringes.