Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

I genuinely cannot see how AI is going to be bad for programmers. It doesnt do the entire job. It does snippits and you must integrate everything. (And if it does the entire job, amazing! Maybe we can spend extra time on a good UI or extra unit tests)

AI could reduce our staff by half, but that isnt what happens. Instead we just get more work done. The productivity increase seems to warrent spending more money on programmers. If we made our company 500k/yr profit before, AI makes us 1M/yr profit now. What if we bring on 2x as many programmers, do we make 2M/yr profit?

I understand not all jobs scale like this, but at least my industry has demand go up since we are more efficient.

Maybe. It's certainly possible that this is the case, but I'm hesitant to believe anything Zuckerberg says during a hype-train, especially when saying that has a non-zero chance of boosting the stock.

But let's suppose that this is true, I don't think it necessarily implies that fewer engineers are actually hired. It could be that this "AI mid-level" engineer frees up resources for the remaining engineers to work on something more interesting.

It feels like people are assuming that there's only so much work that can actually be done, and I don't think that's what happens in practice; instead we figure out how to exploit the resources more instead of doing "the same with less".

Basically I feel most people are not thinking in terms of Gustafson's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law