[singingtoday]

They're going to be overworked.

In the old days we programmed systems by literally wiring them. There wasn't much work, only a few "programmers" were employed. Then somebody came up with Punch cards that was much more vision than wiring the systems directly. This opened the door for a lot more people to use them and now programmers were busier.

The punch cards didn't scale either so eventually we created panels with buttons so we could type the programs into the computers. That was more efficient and now all the sudden it lowered the bar entry and more people who are employed and doing the work.

Assembly language to machine code compilers to assembly language high-level languages and LLMs.

Every time developing software gets easier, it only increases the amount of work required. I'm busier today than I've ever been in my entire life.

What's going to happen to software engineers? They're going to be overworked and they're going to be given more work and the cycle will never end.

[munksbeer]

>Every time developing software gets easier, it only increases the amount of work required. I'm busier today than I've ever been in my entire life.

I have the same sentiment. So far, no indication that I can be replaced yet. Maybe some day, but right now I'm more productive because of AI (*), but just as if not more busy.

(*) Such as: Obviously the coding side, but also...

AI is helping scrape logs to diagnose bugs, and doing so with high accuracy, much, much faster than I could have done.

AI is taking care of my work journal (basically how I manage my own state) by scraping slack, emails, git commits, ticket state changes and everything else, and updating and maintaining my journal each day. I can't overstate how pleased I am with this. I am usually pretty diligent but if I get out of the habit, I could go weeks before I was back in. Now it is trivial and I always do it.

And more.

[james_marks]

Jevon’s paradox. We’ve been constrained by how much software could be produced for decades.

Making it easier/faster doesn’t increase leisure, it increases the demand for (cheaper) software.

[blharr]

And it also increases the competition! Most of the giant tech companies aren't really making money by having X amount of software. They make their money by having software that is better than their competition, so they can get Y amount of users. But if your product's development is now simplified because AI can reproduce it, you still have to work harder to keep that competitive advantage

[mynameisbilly]

The people who own the tools decide how the productivity gains are distributed. The workers could produce the same output in less same and go home earlier. Or the capitalists could keep the worker there the same (or more) hours per day and capture the extra output as profit.

Under capitalism, the choice is always the latter. You correctly identified the pattern that Marx described over 100 years ago. The capitalists own the tools and control the conditions of our labor as software developers. They extract that productivity gain as surplus value, and will never choose to willingly give us more leisure time.