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Comment by andrewmutz | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that hiring the engineers was ever an option. He said that he couldnt maintain six native apps before agentic coding. The business never even considered expanding headcount by 6X to do it, it was a complete nonstarter.

There is no fixed pie of work that AI is taking from us. In this circumstance, increased productivity caused the company to just make more stuff, not lay off people (or avoid planned hires).

It is a real world example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

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To clarify, my point isn't that the market for software won't expand due to the greater productivity unlocked by AI.

It's that the benefits of that productivity won't go to the kinds of people that previously wanted to stay in engineering their whole career.

I'm not sure the Jevons Paradox applies because you're not just making engineering more efficient you're replacing it altogether with something much more commoditised.

People will gain from this but it won't be the same people.

Likewise, consumers will eventually reduce the amount they’re willing to pay for software so it will balance out. It will be a blip in time we look back on. Like, remember when elevators used to employ an operator. Now we just push a button and happily do it without another person’s labor.

Well at least in this particular case, it was the same engineers on the team. He specifically said he tried getting UX people to vibe code things and the results didnt work

Jevon's paradox has to do with consuming resources, not employment. There are plenty of examples of fields getting more efficient and employment falling. Farming and manufacturing being 2 examples.

You're conflating different categories of activities. Farming and manufacturing are amenable to automation precisely because not much real thinking and communication is required.

SE is not like farming.

It is a real world example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

It's an interesting example in that a switch from web/React -> native seems like Jevons paradox from the perspective a developer considering "amount of effort I'd need to put in"

But Jevon's paradox is about consumption of a resource increasing. The resource being "developer effort" but the new supply all running inside GPUs and dev machines. He actually says he decreased their server deployment by 90%.

So on net, did they basically deliver their users a much nicer but functionally equivalent app, which in total now consumes less resources / spends less $ into the economy? And then the $10T question is to what degree this is representative of AI's effect.

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