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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

Machinery made farmers more efficient and now there are more farmers than ever.

Pre industrial revolution something like 80+ percent of the population was involved in agriculture. I question the assertion of more farmers now especially since an ever growing percentage of farms are not even owned by corporeal entities never mind actual farmers.

ooohhh I think I missed the intent of the statement... well done!

80% of the world population back then is less than 50% of the current number of people working in farming, so the assertion isn’t wrong, even if fewer people are working on farming proportionally (as it should be, as more complex, desirable and higher paid options exist)

You might be underestimating complexity and pay. What is and isn’t desirable, and to whom, is also complicated.

i don't think you missed it. Perhaps sarcasm, but the main comment is specifically about programming and seems so many sub comments want to say "what about X" that's nothing to do with programming.

I am not sure if this is sarcasm or a commentary on the explosion of the number of humans out there.

The machinery replaced a lot of low skill labor. But in its wake modern agriculture is now dependent on high skill labor. There are probably more engineers, geologists, climatologists, biologists, chemists, veterinarians, lawyers, and statisticians working in the agriculture sector today than there ever were previously.

Yes: farmers.

Indeed.

And overall fewer farmers with more technological skill sets than back in the dustbowl days.

Here (Western Australia) the increase in average farm size by product can be plotted over time along with the fall in numbers working that land.

Key difference being that there is only a certain amount of food that a person can physically eat before they get sick.

I think it’s a reasonable hypothesis that the amount of software written if it was, say, 20% of its present cost to write it, would be at least 5x what we currently produce.

90 years ago there were about seven million farmers in the US. There are now less than two million.

Is that farm hands, or farm operators? What about corps, how do you calibrate that? Is a corp a "person" or does it count for more? My point is that maybe the definition of "farmer" is being pushed to far, as is the notion of "developer". "Prompt engineer"? Are you kidding me about that? Prompts being about as usefully copyrighted / patentable as a white paper. Do you count them as "engineers" because they say so?

I get your point, hope you get mine: we have less legal entities operating as "farms". If vibe coding makes you a "developer", working on a farm in an operating capacity makes you a "farmer". You might profess to be a biologist / agronomist, I'm sure some owners are, but doesn't matter to me whether you're the owner or not.

The numbers of nonsupervisory operators in farming activities have decreased using the traditional definitions.

No, but both demand and space to grow stuff are very much limitations in that space. They are not even close to being that for programming.

If AI tools make expert developers a lot more productive on large software projects, while empowering non-developers to create their own little programs and automations, I am not sure how that would increase the number of people with “software developer” as their full-time job.

Because you would create lots more large software projects, how that it’s cheaper to do so.

It happened with tools like Excel, for example, which matches your description of empowering non-developers. It happens with non-developers setting up a CMS and then, when hitting the limits of what works out of the box, hiring or commissioning developers to add more complex functions and integrations. Barring AGI, there will always be limitations, and hitting them induces the desire to go beyond.

> when hitting the limits of what works out of the box, hiring or commissioning developers to add more complex functions and integrations.

You aren't going to going to do that to AI systems. If, after a couple of weeks you hit the limit of what the AI could do in a million+ LoC, you aren't going to be able to hire a human dev to modify or replace that system for you, because:

1. Humans are going to be needing a ramp up time and that's damn costly (even more costly when there are fewer of them).

2. Where are you going to find humans who can actually code anymore if everyone has been doing this for the last 10 years?

So, what do you propose non-developers in that situation will be doing then?

> So, what do you propose non-developers in that situation will be doing then?

Look, I dunno what they will do, but these options are certainly off the table:

1. Get a temp dev/team in to patch a 1m SloC mess

2. Do it cost-effectively.

If the tech has improved by the time this happens (I mean, we're nowhere near this scenario yet, and it has already plateaued) then perhaps they can get the LLM itself to simply rewrite it instead of spending all those valuable tokens reading it in and trying to patch it.

If the tech is not up to it, then their options are effectively:

1. Use it as is till the end of time

2. Throw it out, and start again

3. Pray

There’s only so much land and only so much food we need to eat. The bounds on what software we need are much wider. But certainly there is a limit there as well.

Machinery and scale efficiencies made cost of entry higher than ever though

That's not the case for IT where entry barrier has been reduced to nothing.

I think the better example is the mechanization of the loom created a huge amount of jobs in factories relative to the hand loom because the demand for clothing could not be met by the hand loom.

The craftsman who were forced to go to the factory were not paid more or better off.

There is not going to be more software engineers in the future than there is now, at least not in what would be recognizable as software engineering today. I could see there being vastly more startups with founders as agent orchestrators and many more CTO jobs. There is no way there is many more 2026 version of software engineering jobs at S&P 500 companies in the future. That seems borderline delusional to me.

Wait what? There are way less farmers than we had in the past. In many parts of the world, every member of the family was working on the farm, and now only 1 person can do the work of 5-10 people.

the comment was obviously intended to make you think: yes there are fewer human farmers, and more mechanical ones.

Is this sarcasm?

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