[ps256]

Yes.

Developers who know how to use LLMs are some % faster and more productive. You can increase the % enough so that overall demand for developers goes down or doesn't grow as much as it would have otherwise.

It's not "my company laid us all off and replaced us with an LLM" but more like "this year our team is hiring for 3 new people instead of 4" - that's still a significant impact on the job market. And who knows how those numbers will change as LLMs get better.

[iamlucaswolf]

I believe this is a rational assessment in general. A lot of the discussion around this topic seems to be negligent of market dynamics.

However, the crux is in the details:

> You can increase the % enough so that overall demand for developers goes down or doesn't grow as much as it would have otherwise.

I would be at least skeptical of this. Every push for commodification that we've seen in the software space so far has been absorbed by demand. Will this continue forever? Nobody knows. At least where I work the backlog is filled to the brim, and every new iteration of tooling begets more babysitting to unlock the promised gains. And customers still have a never-ending list of hyper-specific feature requests.

The friends and colleagues at the Senior/Staff level who are using Copilot/GPT-4 (and have admittedly become much better than me at prompting) didn't exactly become "hyper-productive". Sure, they get code pushed out faster, but they still work long hours and complain about deadlines.

This is not to say that we're all fine forever and things will not change. But as long as we don't experience an across-the-board temperature shift in the job market decoupled from macro-economic events I wouldn't put too much attention there. In the end, doom scrolling is also just a form of procrastination.

[mejutoco]

That would be true if demand for development in general would remain static. My opinion is that software demand has a lot of room to grow.

If cars become cheaper, car infrastructure gets better people will use more cars, not the same amount. Except I believe there is a lower limit in the amount of cars a person can use vs the amount of automation (through software) a person can use.

[danwee]

> his year our team is hiring for 3 new people instead of 4

Na. We'll be able to do more with less... but the amount of work to be needed will increase, hence more people will be needed as well. Same old story. Compilers didn't get massive people fired.

[ps256]

I don't think anyone can claim certainty on this either way.

My view is that in the past the increases in productivity have come in a period of exponential growth of the software industry and that growth can absorb the additional productivity. But exponential growth doesn't last forever and if you have a period of a declining / flat / slowly growing software field, a significant enough productivity improvement from tools like LLMs can reduce the overall demand for software development.

[retrocryptid]

[citation needed]