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Comment by felipeerias | Hacker News Reader

Does that automatically translate into more openings for the people whose full time job is providing that thing? I’m not sure that it does.

Historically, it would seem that often lowering the amount of people needed to produce a good is precisely what makes it cheaper.

So it’s not hard to imagine a world where AI tools make expert software developers significantly more productive while enabling other workers to use their own little programs and automations on their own jobs.

In such a world, the number of “lines of code” being used would be much greater that today.

But it is not clear to me that the amount of people working full time as “software developers“ would be larger as well.

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> Does that automatically translate into more openings for the people whose full time job is providing that thing?

Not automatically, no.

How it affects employment depends on the shapes of the relevant supply/demand curves, and I don't think those are possible to know well for things like this.

For the world as a whole, it should be a very positive thing if creating usable software becomes an order of magnitude cheaper, and millions of smart people become available for other work.

Given the products that the software industry is largely focused on building (predatory marketing for the attention economy and surveillance), this unfortunately may be the case.

I debate this in my head way to much & from each & every perspective.

Counter argument - if what you say is true, we will have a lot more custom & personalized software and the tech stacks behind those may be even more complicated than they currently are because we're now wanting to add LLMs that can talk to our APIs. We might also be adding multiple LLMs to our back ends to do things as well. Maybe we're replacing 10 but now someone has to manage that LLM infrastructure as well.

My opinion will change by tomorrow but I could see more people building software that are currently experts in other domains. I can also see software engineers focusing more on keeping the new more complicated architecture being built from falling apart & trying to enforce tech standards. Our roles may become more infra & security. Less features, more stability & security.

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