Comment by gombosg

I think there are four fundamental issues here for us...

1. There are actually less software jobs out there, with huge layoffs still going on, so software engineering as a profession doesn't seem to profit from AI.

2. The remaining engineers are expected by their employers to ship more. Even if they can manage that using AI, there will be higher pressure and higher stress on them, which makes their work less fulfilling, more prone to burnout etc.

3. Tied to the previous - this increases workism, measuring people, engineers by some output benchmark alone, treating them more like factory workers instead of expert, free-thinking individuals (often with higher education degrees). Which again degrades this profession as a whole.

3. Measuring developer productivity hasn't really been cracked before either, and still after AI, there is not a lot of real data proving that these tools actually make us more productive, whatever that may be. There is only anecdotal evidence: I did this in X time, when it would have taken me otherwise Y time - but at the same time it's well known that estimating software delivery timelines is next to impossible, meaning, the estimation of "Y" is probably flawed.

So a lot of things going on apart from "the world will surely need more software".