And yet the world hasn’t changed all that much except people getting laid off in response to over-hiring prior to the diffusion of llm’s.
For how long should you be allowed to use this excuse? It’s nearly 5 years since the peak of COVID hiring. What’s an acceptable limit - 10 years? Of course at that point you can just switch over to outsourcing and “stupid MBAs”, the other two of Reddit’s favorite scapegoats. I find a lot of the AI skepticism to be totally unfalsifiable.
Yes, LLMs are a great technology. Yes, we will probably all use them all the time in 20 years. No, we don't know how we will use them (to generate cat memes or to cure cancer) in 20 years time.
Especially for software developers it looks increasingly that after huge turmoil it's likely we will need +/- the same number of developers in the world.
what exactly are you basing this opinion on? All I am seeing personally across multiple projects I am working on and other friends at other places is that downsizing is either begun or is planned (to exclude from here all the “public” layoffs we see on the news). Given how most business operate in the USA I think most of “AI strategies” are “we can do same with -40% staff” vs. “we can do XX% more work with same staff.”
If we can get a little stability, people will begin thinking less in terms of "how do we do the same thing cheaper" and more in terms of "how do we do new things."
1. run a bigger "agent army"
2. hire more people to control and guide the existing "agent army"
I think it'll be #1 and SWEs will be expected to do more work and work longer hours in the future (those that are able to keep their jobs). this is more pessimistic outlook than yours so I hope you are right more than I am :)
edit: just now on the HN front page: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/technology/meta-ai-employ...
> we have all this work that needs to be done and not enough people to get the work done
I believe the reasoning is roughly to ask, what was occupying the developer hours? Was the majority of it typing out lines of code or was it reasoning about higher level concerns?
It usually comes up in response to predictions that the role of developer will be completely replaced in the near future. It's possible to observe significant efficiency gains without obviating the need for everything the role was doing.
Of course such reasoning has little to do with projections of future developer employment numbers. Will the switch from push mowers to gas mowers reduce the demand for people who get paid to mow lawns by increasing their efficiency? Will it increase the total lawn acreage across the market? It could well do both. However, if it makes having a lawn affordable for the average joe it could counterintuitively increase demand for the job.
Of course the stated goal of the AI companies is to develop the analog of fully robotic lawnmowers. But despite how impressive recent advancements have been we still have yet to see any evidence of novel abstract reasoning or a theory that would be expected to lead to it.
In other words, people have been speculating about the development of fully autonomous lawnmowers and the risk that they unilaterally decide to cut us all down for the past 50 years. "I, lawnmower" was a smash hit a few years ago. Now gas ones have appeared and continue to make rapid advancements but still no convincing signs of autonomy.
You're obviously right and the people who think that are the managerial types that think software developers were glorified secretaries writing after dictation.
LLM is great at generating stuff, but it's basically 3D printing. Amazing, but most of the high quality stuff in the world needs to be built at large scale out of aluminum, steel, wood, etc. Yes, I know there are large advances in 3D printing, but maybe 0.000000001% of all manufacturing in the world are done using 3D printing. A lot of stuff will probably never be possible using 3D printing.
A lot of the discourse around AI in general is unfalsifiable. It's just a bunch of people "predicting" the future. Seems smarter to just avoid making assumptions about it at this point.
but we can see trends and for your livehoood it is important to be able to make educated predictions based on trends. not saying everyone should start making AI predictions (though many already do)
The people who pretend that’s not the case are not living in reality. To them - let’s call them “ed Zitron readers” - there is no evidence that could change their view that none of this is really happening, it’s all hype, and the collapse is just around the corner, after which we’ll all go back to normal and LLMs will sound like a bad dream.