[Sammi]

"In economics, the Jevons paradox is said to occur when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource's use lead to a rise, rather than a fall, in total consumption of that resource. Greater efficiency reduces the amount of the resource needed per application, lowering its effective cost; if demand is sufficiently price elastic, this induces demand, frequently resulting in a net increase of total resource consumption."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

[jackdoe]

the elastic demand will be consumed by ai

jevon's paradox just says people will consume more software as software gets cheaper, which is likely true, not that there will be more high paid jobs for programmers.

as programmers are not the resource, the program is the resource, programmers were the means of production of said resource.

stated differently: in a world where you dont need programmers to make programs, there is infinity of programs, and no jobs for programmers.

[dbdr]

You are assuming an infinite productivity boost, i.e. that no programmers at all are needed to make programs.

A more realistic scenario is that programmers are still needed in the foreseeable future (for some definition a what a programmer is, even if it's "understands software enough to be able to write good prompts and judge the results"). So the question is how the productivity boost compares to the increase in the amount of software being made.

[Sammi]

Yes ai + programmer are the resource.

Ai won't work on it's own until we get agi.

[jackdoe]

yes, I assume we will have the 'replicator' from Star Trek, and programs will just appear as you want them.

experiencing the gpt3->4o->sonnet4->opus4.6->fable trajectory I am fairly confident what we call programmer today will not exist, in the same time regular people will finally be able to tell computers what to do and this will unlock the next stage of complexity in manufacturing/material science/medicine and so on.

of course I am likely wrong, people say: its never as good or as bad as you think.

[geraneum]

> gpt3->4o->sonnet4->opus4.6->fable

While there are a lot of resources being poured into improving and integrating tooling and use cases and increasing model sizes, the leap between the models you notes are not as much as you think it is. It's the same tech that's scalable to a certain limit of diminishing return. It's a recurrent pattern in technology.

> yes, I assume we will have the 'replicator' from Star Trek, and programs will just appear as you want them.

Yes, perhaps one day. Probably no other "job" as they are today will have the same shape and form. Cancer will be cured and fission will be solved. We may even crack teleporting. Let's hope these all happen and the outcome is not detrimental the livelihood of humans.

[jackdoe]

> It's the same tech that's scalable to a certain limit of diminishing return.

of course, my point was that gpt3->4o was smaller jump than opus 4.6->fable

[deterministic]

Sorry, but I don't think you understand how many different skills are involved in building software that large companies can actually rely on.

Writing code is only one part of the job. I use Claude Code every day and I love it. It has made me much more productive. But I still have to guide it carefully, review every change, and fix the bugs and poor design decisions it introduces.

Personally, I'm looking forward to retirement. I expect there will be no shortage of consulting work helping companies clean up the AI-generated mess generated by inexperienced developers and overconfident middle manager with zero software development experience :)