[PeterisP]

If a LLM (or any other tool) makes so that team of 8 can get the same results in the same time as it used to take a team of 10 to do, then I would count that as "replaced 2 programmers" - even if there's no particular person for which the whole job has been replaced, that's not a meaningful practical difference, replacing a significant fraction of every programmer's job has the same outcomes and impacts as replacing a significant fraction of programmers.

[RangerScience]

Fav anecdote from ages ago:

When hand-held power tools became a thing, the Hollywood set builder’s union was afraid of this exact same thing - people would be replaced by the tools.

Instead, productions built bigger sets (the ceiling was raised) and smaller productions could get in on things (the floor was lowered).

I always took that to mean “people aren’t going to spend less to do the job - they’ll just do a bigger job.”

[esmevane]

It's always played out like this in software, by the way. Famously, animation shops hoped to save money on production by switching over to computer rendered cartoons. What happened instead is that a whole new industry took shape, and brought along with it entire cottage industries of support workers. Server farms required IT, renders required more advanced chips, some kinds of animation required entirely new rendering techniques in the software, etc.

A few hundred animators turned into a few thousand computer animators & their new support crew, in most shops. And new, smaller shops took form! But the shops didn't go away, at least not the ones who changed.

It basically boils down to this: some shops will act with haste and purge their experts in order to replace them with LLMs, and others will adopt the LLMs, bring on the new support staff they need, and find a way to synthesize a new process that involves experts and LLMs.

Shops who've abandoned their experts will immediately begin to stagnate and produce more and more mediocre slop (we're seeing it already!) and the shops who metamorphose into the new model you're speculating at will, meanwhile, create a whole new era of process and production. Right now, you really want to be in that second camp - the synthesizers. Eventually the incumbents will have no choice but to buy up those new players in order to coup their process.

[mitthrowaway2]

The saddle, the stirrup, the horseshoe, the wagon, the plough, and the drawbar all enhanced the productivity of horses and we only ended up employing more of them.

Then the steam engine and internal combustion engine came around and work horses all but disappeared.

There's no economic law that says a new productivity-enhancing programming tool is always a stirrup and never a steam engine.

[karaterobot]

Another anecdote: when mechanical looms became a thing, textile workers were afraid that the new tools would replace them, and they were right.

[sigmarule]

This could very well prove to be the case in software engineering, but also could very well not; what is the equivalent of "larger sets" in our domain, and is that something that is even preferable to begin with? Should we build larger codebases just because we _can_? I'd say likely not, while it does make sense to build larger/more elaborate movie sets because they could.

Also, a piece missing from this comparison is a set of people who don't believe the new tool will actually have a measurable impact on their domain. I assume few-to-none could argue that power tools would have no impact on their profession.

[pixeltechie]

This is a good example of what could happen to software development as a whole. In my experience large companies tend to more often buy software rather than make it. Ai could drastically change the "make or buy" decision in favour of make. Because you need less developers to create a perfect tailored solution that directly fits the needs of the company. So "make" becomes affordable and more attractive.

[nidnogg]

This is a real thing. LLMs are tools, not humans. They truly do bring interesting, bigger problems.

Have people seen some of the recent software being churned out? Hint, it's not all GenAI bubblespit. A lot of it is killer, legitimately good stuff.

[hn_throwaway_99]

That's actually not accurate. See Jevons paradox, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox. In the short term, LLMs should have the effect of making programmers more productive, which means more customers will end up demanding software that was previously uneconomic to build (this is not theoretical - e.g. I work with some non-profits who would love a comprehensive software solution, they simply can't afford it, or the risk, at present).

[hnthrowaway6543]

yes, this. the backlog of software that needs to be built is fucking enormous.

you know what i'd do if AI made it so i could replace 10 devs with 8? use the 2 newly-freed up developers to work on some of the other 100000 things i need done

[robwwilliams]

Ditto for most academic biomedical research: we desperately need more high quality customized code. Instead we have either nothing or Python/R code written by a grad student or postdoc—code that dies a quick death.

[IshKebab]

> then I would count that as "replaced 2 programmers"

Well then you can count IDEs, static typing, debuggers, version control etc. as replacing programmers too. But I don't think any of those performance enhancers have really reduced the number of programmers needed.

In fact it's a well known paradox that making a job more efficient can increase the number of people doing that job. It's called the Jevons paradox (thanks ChatGPT - probably wouldn't have been able to find that with Google!)

Making people 20% more efficient is very different to entirely replacing them.

[fragmede]

I know it's popular to hate on Google, but a link to the Wikipedia is the first result I get for a Google search of "efficiency paradox".

[akircher]

As a founder, I think that this viewpoint misses the reality of a fixed budget. If I can make my team of 8 as productive as 10 with LLMs then I will. But that doesn’t mean that without LLMs I could afford to hire 2 more engineers. And in fact if LLMs make my startup successful then it could create more jobs in the future.