[dragonwriter]

> AI efficiency gains don’t benefit employees—they benefit employers who get more output from the same salary.

So, they also benefit developers that become solopreneurs.

So they increase the next-best alternative for developers compared to work as employees.

What happens when you improve the next-best alternative?

> AI tools are just the latest mechanism for extracting more output from the same wage.

The whole history of software development has been rapid introduction of additional automation (because no field has been more the focus of software development than itself), and looking at the history of developer salaries, that has not been a process of "extracting more output from the same wage". Yes, output per $ wage has gone up, but real wages per hour or day worked for developers have also gone up, and done so faster than wages across the economy generally. It is true and problematic that the degree of capitalism in the structure of the modern mixed economy means that the gains of productivity go disproportionately to capital, but it is simply false to say that they go exclusively to capital across the board, and it is particularly easy to see that this has specifically been false in the case of productivity gains from further automation in software development.