100% this.

I'll also add another factor: it's become increasingly clear at our company that AI-enabled humans are getting to the bottom of the backlog of feature ideas much quicker. This makes the 'good ideas' part of the business the rate limiting step. And those are definitely not increasing with AI, beyond that generated by the AI churn itself ("let's bolt on a chat experience or an MCP!")

So maybe the coding assistants don't get a 10x improvement any time soon, but we see engineering job market contraction because there aren't really enough good ideas to turn into code.

Yes, but as the price of getting work done goes down, a lot of companies that were priced out of custom software before now can hire devs, as the value hiring a few can provide just goes up. Fewer people per product, absolutely. No more teams of 10 or 20 working on the same thing. But there's so much out there that doesn't get done at all because you'd never be able to afford it.

Simple marginal thinking: When you lower the price of something, it gets more use cases. A rich person might not take even more flights because they are cheaper, but more people will consider flying when they wouldn't have at old prices