The recurring dream of replacing developers

It never happened before so it will never happen.

"(...) maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were." Haha this is funny. Interesting reading.

> What is happening now. What the trendlines look like. What follows if those trendlines continue. Output per developer is rising. Time from idea to implementation is collapsing. Junior and mid level work is disappearing first. Teams are shipping with fewer people. These are not hypotheticals.

My dude, I just want to point out that there is no evidence of any of this, and a lot of evidence of the opposite.

> If you want to engage honestly, you stop citing the past and start following the numbers. You accept where the trendlines lead, even

You first, lol.

> This is how self delusion works

Yeah, about that...

At least in case of the kitchen contractor, you can trust all the electrical equipment, plumbing etc. is going to be connected in such a way that disasters won't happen. And if it is not, at least you can sue the contractor.

The problem with LLMs is that it is not only the "irrelevant details" that are hallucinated. It is also "very relevant details" which either make the whole system inconsistent or full of security vulnerabilities.

“There is no evidence” is not skepticism. It’s abdication. It’s what people say when they want the implications to go away without engaging with anything concrete. If there is “a lot of evidence of the opposite,” the minimum requirement is to name one metric, one study, or one observable trend. You didn’t. You just asserted it and moved on, which is not how serious disagreement works.

“You first, lol” isn’t a rebuttal either. It’s an evasion. The claim was not “the labor market has already flipped.” The claim was that AI-assisted coding has changed individual leverage, and that extrapolating that change leads somewhere uncomfortable. Demanding proof that the future has already happened is a category error, not a clever retort.

And yes, the self-delusion paragraph clearly hit, because instead of addressing it, you waved vaguely and disengaged. That’s a tell. When identity is involved, people stop arguing substance and start contesting whether evidence is allowed to count yet.

Now let’s talk about evidence, using sources who are not selling LLMs, not building them, and not financially dependent on hype.

Martin Fowler has explicitly written about AI-assisted development changing how code is produced, reviewed, and maintained, noting that large portions of what used to be hands-on programmer labor are being absorbed by tools. His framing is cautious, but clear: AI is collapsing layers of work, not merely speeding up typing. That is labor substitution at the task level.

Kent Beck, one of the most conservative voices in software engineering, has publicly stated that AI pair-programming fundamentally changes how much code a single developer can responsibly produce, and that this alters team dynamics and staffing assumptions. Beck is not bullish by temperament. When he says the workflow has changed, he means it.

Bjarne Stroustrup has explicitly acknowledged that AI-assisted code generation changes the economics of programming by automating work that previously required skilled human attention, while also warning about misuse. The warning matters, but the admission matters more: the work is being automated.

Microsoft Research, which is structurally separated from product marketing, has published peer-reviewed studies showing that developers using AI coding assistants complete tasks significantly faster and with lower cognitive load. These papers are not written by executives. They are written by researchers whose credibility depends on methodological restraint, not hype.

GitHub Copilot’s controlled studies, authored with external researchers, show measurable increases in task completion speed, reduced time-to-first-solution, and increased throughput. You can argue about long-term quality. You cannot argue “no evidence” without pretending these studies don’t exist.

Then there is plain, boring observation.

AI-assisted coding is directly eliminating discrete units of programmer labor: boilerplate, CRUD endpoints, test scaffolding, migrations, refactors, first drafts, glue code. These were not side chores. They were how junior and mid-level engineers justified headcount. That work is disappearing as a category, which is why junior hiring is down and why backfills quietly don’t happen.

You don’t need mass layoffs to identify a structural shift. Structural change shows up first in roles that stop being hired, positions that don’t get replaced, and how much one person can ship. Waiting for headline employment numbers before acknowledging the trend is mistaking lagging indicators for evidence.

If you want to argue that AI-assisted coding will not compress labor this time, that’s a valid position. But then you need to explain why higher individual leverage won’t reduce team size. Why faster idea-to-code cycles won’t eliminate roles. Why organizations will keep paying for surplus engineering labor when fewer people can deliver the same output.

But “there is no evidence” isn’t a counterargument. It’s denial wearing the aesthetic of rigor.