Comment by jackfranklyn
8 hours ago
The pattern that gets missed in these discussions: every "no-code will replace developers" wave actually creates more developer jobs, not fewer.
COBOL was supposed to let managers write programs. VB let business users make apps. Squarespace killed the need for web developers. And now AI.
What actually happens: the tooling lowers the barrier to entry, way more people try to build things, and then those same people need actual developers when they hit the edges of what the tool can do. The total surface area of "stuff that needs building" keeps expanding.
The developers who get displaced are the ones doing purely mechanical work that was already well-specified. But the job of understanding what to build in the first place, or debugging why the automated thing isn't doing what you expected - that's still there. Usually there's more of it.
In the face of productivity increase and lower barrier of entry, other professionals move to capture the increase in productivity for their own members and erect barriers to prevent others from taking their tasks. In IT, we celebrate how our productivity increase benefited the broader economy, how more people in other roles could now build stuff, with the strong belief that employment of developers and adjacent roles will continue to increase and how we could get those new roles.
Classic Jevons Paradox - when something gets cheaper the market for it grows. The unit cost shrinks but the number of units bought grows more than this shrinkage.
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.
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.
Of course that is true. The nuance here is that software isn’t just getting cheaper but the activity to build it is changing. Instead of writing lines of code you are writing requirements. That shifts who can do the job. The customer might be able to do it themselves. This removes a market, not grows one. I am not saying the market will collapse just be careful applying a blunt theory to such a profound technological shift that isn’t just lowering cost but changing the entire process.
You say that like someone that has been coding for so long you have forgotten what it's like to not know how to code. The customer will have little idea what is even possible and will ask for a product that doesn't solve their actual problem. AI is amazing at producing answers you previously would have looked up on stack overflow, which is very useful. It often can type faster that than I can which is also useful. However, if we are going to see the exponential improvements towards AGI AI boosters talk about we would have already seen the start of it.
When LLMs first showed up publicly it was a huge leap forward, and people assumed it would continue improving at the rate they had seen but it hasn't.
5 replies →
> The customer might be able to do it themselves
Have you ever paid for software? I have, many times, for things I could build myself
Building it yourself as a business means you need to staff people, taking them away from other work. You need to maintain it.
Run even conservative numbers for it and you'll see it's pretty damn expensive if humans need to be involved. It's not the norm that that's going to be good ROI
No matter how good these tools get, they can't read your mind. It takes real work to get something production ready and polished out of them
> Instead of writing lines of code you are writing requirements.
https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensi...
There are also technical requirements, which, in practice, you will need to make for applications. Technical requirements can be done by people that can't program, but it is very close to programming. You reach a manner of specification where you're designing schemas, formatting specs, high level algorithms, and APIs. Programmers can be, and are, good at this, and the people doing it who aren't programmers would be good programmers.
At my company, we call them technical business analysts. Their director was a developer for 10 years, and then skyrocket through the ranks in that department.
1 reply →
"Thinking clearly about complexity" is much more that writing requirements.
1 reply →
Jevons paradox is the stupid. What happened in the past is not a guarantee for the future. If you look at the economy, you would struggle to find buyers for any slop AI can generate, but execs keep pushing it. Case in point the whole Microslop saga, where execs start treating paying customers as test subjects to please the share holders.
> The pattern that gets missed in these discussions: every "no-code will replace developers" wave actually creates more developer jobs, not fewer.
Doesn't mean it will happen this time (i.e. if AI truly becomes what was promised) and actually it's not likely it will!
I felt like the article had a good argument for why the AI hype will similarly be unsuccessful at erasing developers.
> AI changes how developers work rather than eliminating the need for their judgment. The complexity remains. Someone must understand the business problem, evaluate whether the generated code solves it correctly, consider security implications, ensure it integrates properly with existing systems, and maintain it as requirements evolve.
What is your rebuttal to this argument leading to the idea that developers do need to fear for their job security?
> evaluate whether the generated code solves it correctly, consider security implications, ensure it integrates properly with existing systems, and maintain it as requirements evolve
I think you are basing your reasoning on the current generation of models. But if future generation will be able to do everything you've listed above, what work will be there left for developers? I'm not saying that we will ever get such models, just that when they appear, they will actually displace developers and not create more jobs for them. The business problem will be specified by business people, and even if they get it wrong it won't matter because iteration will be quick and cheap.
> What is your rebuttal to this argument leading to the idea that developers do need to fear for their job security?
The entire argument is based on assumption that models won't get better and will never be able to do things you've listed! But once they become capable of these things - what work will be there for developers?
> if AI truly becomes what was promised
I mean they are promising AGI.
Of course in that case it will not happen this time. However, in that case software dev getting automated would concern me less than the risk of getting turned into some manner of office supply.
Imo as long as we do NOT have AGI, software-focused professional will stay a viable career path. Someone will have to design software systems on some level of abstraction.
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)
1 reply →
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.
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.
1 reply →
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is this sarcasm?
The honest truth is it can go either way, really. Just ask all the sign-painters and portrait artists how their career is going
But sign painting isn't programming? The comment is insightful and talks specifically of low and no code options creating more need for developers. Great point. has nothing to do with non programming jobs.
what is special about programming jobs that makes them permanently immune from the high skilled workers being in low demand
>every "no-code will replace developers" wave actually creates more developer jobs, not fewer
you mean "created", past tense. You're basically arguing it's impossible for technical improvements to reduce the number of programmers in the world, ever. The idea that only humans will ever be able to debug code or interpret non-technical user needs seems questionable to me.
This doesn’t seem immediately false. Industrial society creates more complexity and specializations. There is more work to do all the time.
Actual AI seems like a possibility here.
Also the percentage of adults working has been dropping for a while. Retired used to be a tiny fraction of the population that’s no longer the case, people spend more time being educated or in prison etc.
Overall people are seeing a higher standard of living while doing less work.
2 replies →
I think there's a parallel universe with things like system administration. I remember people not valuing windows sysadmins (as opposed to unix), because all the stuff was gui-based. lol.
This suggests that the latent demand was a lot but it still doesnt prove it is unbounded.
At some point the low hanging automation fruit gets tapped out. What can be put online that isnt there already? Which business processes are obviously going to be made an order magnitude more efficient?
Moreover, we've never had more developers and we've exited an anomalous period of extraordinarily low interest rates.
The party might be over.
Yep, the current crunch experienced by developers is massively (but not exclusivly) on younger less experienced developers.
I was working with developer training for a while some 5-10 years back and already then I was starting to see some signs of an incoming over-saturation, the low interest rates probably masked much of it due to happy go lucky investments sucking up developers.
Low hanging and cheap automation,etc work is quickly dwindling now, especially as development firms are searching out new niches when the big "in-IT" customers aren't buying services inside the industry.
Luckily people will retire and young people probably aren't as bullish about the industry anymore, so we'll probably land in an equilebrium, the question is how long it'll take, because the long tail of things enabled by the mobile/tablet revolution is starting to be claimed.
Look at traditional manufacturing. Automation has made massive inroads. Not as much of the economy is directly supporting (eg, auto) manufacturers as it used to be (stats check needed). Nevertheless, there are plenty of mechanical engineering jobs. Not so many lower skill line worker jobs in the US any more, though. You have to ask yourself which category you are in (by analogy). Don’t be the SWE working on the assembly line.
>Don’t be the SWE working on the assembly line.
The job is literally building automation.
There is no equivalent to "working on the assembly line" as an SWE.
>Not so many lower skill line worker jobs in the US any more, though
Because Globalization.
2 replies →
Right! Sysadmins got displaced, but many became developers.
this works for small increments in skill or small shifts in adjacent skills.
imagine being an engineer educated in multiple instruction sets: when compilers arrive on the scene it sure makes their job easier, but that does not retroactively change their education to suddenly have all the requisite mathematics and domain knowledge of say algorithms and data structures.
what is euphemistically described as a "remaining need for people to design, debug and resolve unexpected behaviors" is basically a lie by omission: the advent of AI does not automatically mean previously representative human workers suddenly will know higher level knowledge in order to do that. it takes education to achieve that, no trivial amount of chatbotting will enable displaced human workers to attain that higher level of consciousness. perhaps it can be attained by designing software that uploads AI skills to humans...
The remaining developers also got a big pay bump.
> lowers the barrier to entry, way more people try to build things, and then those same people need actual developers when they hit the edges of what the tool can do
I was imagining companies expanding the features they wanted and was skeptical that would be close to enough, but this makes way more sense