Earlier quoted context omitted.
The risk is that lay people read comments like this and conclude "ergo, we need fewer programmers." Nothing that the LLM is outputting is useful in the hands of somebody who couldn't have done it themselves (at least, given a reasonable amount of time). The most apt analogy is that of pilot and autopilot. Autopilot makes the job of the pilot more pleasant, but it doesn't even slightly obviate the need for the pilot,…
> ergo, we need fewer programmers. How so? And in what context? Where I am, headcount is based on "can we finish and sustain these planned and present required projects". If these automations allow a developer to burn less time, it reduces the need for headcount. As a direct result of this approach to hiring based on need, the concept of a "layoff" doesn't exist where I am.
This is exactly the fallacy, and it's very hard to see why it's a fallacy if you've never professionally written code (and even then).
Software development work fills to occupy the time allotted to it. That's because there is always a tradeoff between time and quality. If you have time available, you will fundamentally alter your approach to writing that piece of software. A rough analogy: air travel doesn't mean we take fewer vacations -- it just means we take vacations to farther away places.
Because of this effect, a dev can really finish a project in as little time as you want (up to a reasonable minimum). It just comes down to how much quality loss and risk can be tolerated. I can make a restaurant website in 1 hour (on Wix/Squarespace) or in 3 months (something hand-crafted and sophisticated). The latter is not "wasted time", it just depends on where you move the lever.
However, sometimes this is a false tradeoff. It isn't always necessary that the place you flew 3 hours will give you a better vacation than some place you could've driven to in 3 hours. You only hope it's better.
>As a direct result of this approach to hiring based on need, the concept of a "layoff" doesn't exist where I am.
LLMs or not, you could've just hired fewer people and made it work anyway. It's not like if you hired 3 people instead of 6 before the LLM era, it was impossible to do.
The gist of it is that LLMs are mostly just devs having fun and tinkering about, or making their quality of life better, or implementing some script, tooling, or different approach that they might've avoided before LLMs. There's no powertrain from that stuff to business efficiency.