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Comment by mycall | Hacker News Reader

We will remain to be programmers but at a higher abstraction where code is just the glue to our means and imagination.

As a hobby I suppose. There's a very real chance there won't be enough paid work available for that

Exactly! There isn't enough woodworking jobs for thousands of thousands of workers. Of course you have people handcrafting things and people demanding handcrafted things. Programming will be the same.

Way way way less developers.

This doesn’t seem right to me. Carpentry still seems like a pretty solid line of work with a lot of jobs. I know at least one guy who moved from EE work to contracting because he could make a lot more money that way.

Given, a lot of it is framing houses and remodeling. And there are fewer jobs in hardwood furniture these days. But a lot of that is because US furniture manufacturing was moved to China 20 years ago, not because of power tools.

If anything, the advent of power tools in the 40s/50s made single family homes more affordable and increased construction demand.

You’re ignoring Jevons paradox. Everyone, both people and companies, will be making exponentially more software with these tools. Software that both needs to get created, debugged and updated to realize the intention of it. That’s what our time will be spent on as programmers.

Do you have any evidence that the demand for developers is largely price elastic?

People are already struggling to find work from oversupply of talent and not enough demand

At the same time ability to write software is exploding we are watching large entities in the market consolidated and small businesses end up on the down side of the K shaped economy. Programmers demand and pay should go down as supply increases just like every other person in an economy.

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