Whoever comes into power next better start thinking about universal income fast. We are gonna get there sooner than expected.
Of course it's very disruptive for people that lose their jobs, but many of them will get similar new jobs, and the overall impact is higher output.
The impact of that transformation remains to be seen.
(1) Laying off people increases margins immediately.
(2) Creating new initiatives pays off in years, if initiatives are taken on carefully, not just thrown at walls.
That means even if (2) is happening, the signal won't show up for years, but (1) will happen immediately, regardless.
This is not a reasonable premise.
Why would CEOs care?
Or put it another way, if you were a CEO, would you care?
Politicians at least would pretend to care.
Why would the Jevons Paradox not apply here?
There will be loads more people who will want software customized to themselves and their needs!
The catch, of course, is that there are, all of a sudden, a whole lot more people who will now be able to create that software.
How will it all land? No idea. But it just feels like a bad idea to go long on software development when weighed against the opportunity cost of going long on domain expertise.
For instance, from 1980 to 1990, the number of secretaries doing all the typing and filing in the workforce severely constricted. That said, the number of actual typists in the workforce skyrocketed!
No one lost the need for typing and filing services. Tools, (PC, word processors, databases), simply became more available. Which decreased the need for people who were formerly doing the typing and filing as a service. Now people could reliably do the typing and filing on their own.
Jevon's paradox in action! Exponentially more typing and filing is happening today than was happening in 1976 or 1980. At the same time, there are infinitesimally smaller numbers of actual secretaries out in the workforce today than were in the workforce pre-1980. And the ones that are still in the workforce are doing much different work than they did pre-1980.
If any of these tools did 10% of what their proponents claim they would become trillion dollar companies overnight and not you know... struggle so hard selling the amazing elixirs and perpetual labor machines.
Source?
What you're claiming is completely untrue. There have been claims like this circulating on the internet recently, and they're all based off this one chart:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE
There are a few major problems with this. First, all of the data comes from one source: Indeed. Indeed SURGED in popularity in the Covid years and interestingly fell off in popularity at exactly the same time as the FRED chart topped. Hey look - the chart for total jobs posted on Indeed looks similar:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXNEWUS
Beyond that, the effect is further exacerbated by the fact that tech hiring went absolutely fucking bonkers during Covid as everyone was convinced we would be stuck inside forever and money was literally free to borrow. The FRED chart only shows us the data during Covid. The inability to see realistic developer hiring numbers before that limits your context and gives a false impression. Here's a chart that goes a few years further back (first one on this page) and shows that hiring has simply normalized:
https://www.dallasfed.org/research/swe/2024/swe2406
Finally, look at the first chart again. Claude Code was released in May 2025. The chart has actually been RISING since that point.
But the software sector was cut in half by Claude Code. Right. And the false narrative marches on. It's honestly amazing to me how people just soak up false information with literally zero filter and zero critical thought or willingness to do some research.