There are developers outside of your country that are talented, speak your language competently, and willing to work for less pay. There are plenty of reasons to believe that such devs will increase in numbers.
My last job was a mix of on shore and off, and we had about a 40% success rate on the offshore compared to roughly 85% onshore in terms of people working out, but also a fairly small sample size.
Latin American countries have become more popular for offshoring lately as you can get cheaper than US rates but still have the same or similar time zones.
Because if I want a low-cost, low-quality dev, and Claude fills that role better than an outsourced dev, such people will "decrease in numbers" due to supply and demand.
Perhaps my point wasn't clear. The article suggests humans are needed. So does the person here I responded to. Someone has to tell the LLM what to do and verify it.
Outsourced can be anywhere and when you're referring to US, anywhere else is cheaper. Commonwealth devs for example are at least 20% the cost of a US dev. That 20% more than covers the cost of access to a frontier model that this dev could drive.
Thinking of LLMs in human units is super strange and if you wish to consider the economics you have to also account for the lowering of barriers to entry.
My point is that current-year LLMs are a better replacement for low-skilled developers than high-skilled developers. For example, if your mental model in 2016 was that you would have a senior engineer write a specification, and have an outsourced team in India implement the specification, in 2026, an LLM replaces the outsourced team in India, not the senior engineer. As a bonus, everyone is now in the same time zone, and there are no language or cultural barriers.
Frontier models are pretty good at executing on a spec when all the decisions have been made already. The author reached the same conclusion. It's the agency that the humans bring that ties it all together, which is still required. Doesn't sound like you disagree.
I think where were missing each other is that the human agent can also be outsourced. Not all outsourcing involves rote tasks and the lowest skilled workers. The difference between the mean US senior dev salary and everywhere else is large enough to cover a manageable LLM cost. So there's no reason why a company looking to cut costs need stop at the lowest rung to makeup for LLM expenditure.
yes, every idea's guy that is pumping out SaaS slop as a last ditch effort to avoid a permanent underclass will get priced out of SOTA subscriptions and have to hire cheap offshore developers again. there are a lot of idea's guys. people with no capital and no skills, but ideas.
but for OP's use case, people with some capital and many skills who need additional help, AI is solving a problem in a way that was not solvable before, while improving on coordination abilities and coordination velocity. Offshore developers do not come back into play here.