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| ▲ | aurareturn 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Yes. That could be said for engineers as well. If the business can no longer justify 5 engineers, then they might only have 1. I've always said that we won't need fewer software developers with AI. It's just that each company will require fewer developers but there will be more companies. IE: 2022: 100 companies employ 10,000 engineers 2026: 1000 companies employ 10,000 engineers The net result is the same for emplyoment. But because AI makes it that much more efficient, many businesses that weren't financially viable when it needed 100 engineers might become viable with 10 engineers + AI. |
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| ▲ | SturgeonsLaw 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | There's another scenario... 100 companies employ 1000 engineers | | |
| ▲ | gjm11 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The person you're replying to is obviously and explicitly aware that that is another scenario, and the whole point of their comment was to argue against it and explain why they think something else is more likely. Merely restating the thing they were already arguing against adds nothing to the discussion. | | | |
| ▲ | aurareturn 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Why do you think this outcome is more likely? | | |
| ▲ | oldjim798 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Because this is what capital has told us. Capital always wants to reduce the labour cost to $0. | | |
| ▲ | aurareturn 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If labor cost is close to $0, even more businesses that weren’t viable before would become viable. Do you not see the logic? | | |
| ▲ | menaerus 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Demand is the driver not only the cost. | |
| ▲ | squeefers 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | ai is bad because it's automated his job. luddites in tech. a real contradiction | | |
| ▲ | DangitBobby 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Not really a contradiction, since the entire point of jobs and the economy at all is to serve the specific needs of humanity and not to maximize paper clip production. If we should be learning anything from the modern era it's something that should have always been obvious: the Luddites were not the bad guys. The truth is you've fallen for centuries old propaganda. Hopefully someday you'll evolve into someone who doesn't carry water for paperclip maximizers. |
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| ▲ | 9rx 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Zero labor cost should see the number of engineers trend towards infinity. The earlier comment suggested the opposite — that it would fall to just 1000 engineers. That would indicate that the cost of labor has skyrocketed. | | |
| ▲ | DangitBobby 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | That doesn't make sense. Demand isn't entirely dictated by cost. There is only so much productivity the world is equipped to consume. | | |
| ▲ | 9rx 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | What difference does that make? If the cost of an engineer is zero, they can work on all kinds of nonsensical things that will never be used/consumed. It doesn't really matter as it doesn't cost anything. | | |
| ▲ | DangitBobby 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm kinda baffled by your suggestion. That's just not how people or organizations run by people operate. Cost is not the only driver to demand. | | |
| ▲ | 9rx 34 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > That's just not how people or organizations run by people operate. Au contraire. It's not very often that the cost of labor actually drops to anywhere close to zero, but we have some examples. The elevator operator is a prime example. When it was costly to hire an operator we could only hire a few of them. Nowadays anyone who is willing to operate an elevator just has to show up and they automatically get the job. If 1,000 engineers are worth having around, why not an infinite number of them, just like those working as elevator operators? Again, there is no cost in this hypothetical scenario. > Cost is not the only driver to demand. Technically true, but we're not talking about garbage here. Humans are always valuable to some degree, just not necessarily valuable enough when there is a cost to balance. But, again, we're talking about zero cost. I expect you are getting caught up in thinking about scenarios where labor still has a cost, perhaps confusing zero cost with zero payroll? |
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| ▲ | ap99 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yes and no. Five engineers could be turned into maybe two, but probably not less. It's the 'bus factor' at play. If you still want human approvals on pull requests then If one of those engineers goes on vacation or leaves the company you're stuck with one engineer for a while. If both leave then you're screwed. If you're a small startup, then sure there are no rules and it's the wild west. One dev can run the world. |
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| ▲ | marginalia_nu 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | This was true even before LLMs. Development has always scaled very poorly with team size. A team of 20 heads is like at most twice as productive as a team of 5, and a team of 5 is marginally more productive than a team of 3. Peak productivity has always been somewhere between 1-3 people, though if any one of those people can't or won't continue working for one reason or another, it's generally game over for the project. So you hire more. This is why small software startups time and time again manage to run circles around with organizations with much larger budgets. A 10 person game studio like Team Cherry can release smash hit after smash hit, while Ubisoft with 170,000% the personnel count visibly flounders. Imagine doing that in hardware, like if you could just grab some buddies and start a business successfully competing with TSMC out of your garage. That's clearly not possible. But in software, it actually is. |
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| ▲ | matwood 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That assumes your backlog is finite. Is the tech writers backlog also seemingly infinite like every tech backlog I've ever seen? |
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| ▲ | imtringued 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The tech writer backlog is probably worse, because writing good documentation requires extensive experience with the software you're writing documentation about and there are four types of documentation you need to produce. | |
| ▲ | DeborahWrites 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes. Yes it is. |
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| ▲ | ekidd 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yes. I have been building software and acting as tech lead for close to 30 years. I am not even quite sure I know how to manage a team of more than two programmers right now. Opus 4.5, in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing, can develop software almost as fast as I can write specs and review code. And it's just plain better at writing code than 60% of my graduating class was back in the day. I have banned at least one person from ever writing a commit message or pull request again, because Claude will explain it better. Now, most people don't know to squeeze that much productivity out of it, most corporate procurement would take 9 months to buy a bucket if it was raining money outside, and it's possible to turn your code into unmaintainable slop at warp speed. And Claude is better at writing code than it is at almost anything else, so the rest of y'all are safe for a while. But if you think that tech writers, or translators, or software developers are the only people who are going to get hit by waves of downsizing, then you're not paying attention. Even if the underlying AI tech stalls out hard and permanently in 2026, there's a wave of change coming, and we are not ready. Nothing in our society, economy or politics is ready to deal with what's coming. And that scares me a bit these days. |
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| ▲ | aniou 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | "And it's just plain better at writing code than 60% of my graduating class was back in the day". Only because it has access to vast amount of sample code to draw a re-combine parts. Did You ever considered emerging technologies, like new languages or frameworks that may be a much better suited for You area but they are new, thus there is no codebase for LLM to draw from? I'm starting to think about a risk of technological stagnation in many areas. |
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| ▲ | raincole 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| We have been seeing this happen in real time in the past two years, no? |
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| ▲ | amelius 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Yes. But they are now called managers. |
