AI Will Create More Developers, Not Less

Why is more quantity good? Why is "developer growth" good? Isn't it important whether these developers all have good quality of life, and whether they're building quality software? Is it a good thing if we have a hundred thousand new developers, all building low quality software on top of Copilot output, and then a few years from now all of that stuff starts breaking and we don't have enough expert developers around to come in and clean up the mess?

I think opening doors for more people to enter the career is good, and making it easier for developers to do their jobs is good. But I don't think quantity over quality is the right model to apply to software development, because history is full of examples of how just shipping something that works can mean massive expensive consequences down the road.

There's still a big difference between someone with experience and someone without, LLMs haven't bridged that gap.

Knowing how to use an LLM, having access to a good one, using it regularly anywhere you can, you would still get, what - 10%, 20% increase in productivity? It's significant but it's not "your experience and education don't matter" level of significant.

And on the other side of the room some people are still arguing whether these things are useful for anything at all.

I am believing that, too. Just imagine this:

Take a Laptop with WinXP+Office 98 from the 2000 era and travel back in time to the 60s or 70s using a time machine. Show the power of Excel to any of those developers punching holes into a punch card, feeding room-sized "computers". Tell them that this "Excel" tool is used by business and sales people without any programming skills. Those developers would clearly tell their children to learn other professions, as no one will need developers in the future because this "Excel" and "Access" make it so easy. But the opposite become true, we needed more devs than ever at that time. Our field will change, the way we develop software did change and will continue to do so - maybe using AI all day.

If this article is right, great.

If this article is not right, the consequences for those of us without independent means could be dire. The time to create a safety net for those displaced by AI is now.

>I propose a simple lens to settle this debate: look around you and count how many products or services you use regularly that you wish are better digitized or “software-ized.” Unless and until that number is 0, there will be more developers, not less.

What? How does this logic work out?

Is this not considering how AIs can software-ize products and services in place of a software developer?

How about talking about how AI can empower a single developer to do the job of 10 people?

These logical implications obviously point to "less developers".

I mean it seems really really obvious to me. Whether you agree with the potential of AI or not you need your "lens" to include this angle.

The problem I'm seeing is a lot of "simplification" to the point of blindness. Certain Software engineers don't want to face a world where a machine completely trivializes the skills they spent to much time cultivating so they self induce blindness. They lie to themselves the same way tobacco execs and big oil execs had to lie to themselves before lying to the world.

The main problem is this: While we made significant progress with LLMs in producing an intelligent AI, We don't know if the current problems with LLMs (hallucinations, occasional logic errors, etc..) are technological dead ends... That's it.

That's the main crux everyone is debating about. Even the big experts in AI like Hinton are divided on this fact so there is actual controversy here.