If the business can no longer justify 5 engineers, then they might only have 1.
I've always said that we won't need fewer software developers with AI. It's just that each company will require fewer developers but there will be more companies.
IE:
2022: 100 companies employ 10,000 engineers
2026: 1000 companies employ 10,000 engineers
The net result is the same for emplyoment. But because AI makes it that much more efficient, many businesses that weren't financially viable when it needed 100 engineers might become viable with 10 engineers + AI.
Five engineers could be turned into maybe two, but probably not less.
It's the 'bus factor' at play. If you still want human approvals on pull requests then If one of those engineers goes on vacation or leaves the company you're stuck with one engineer for a while.
If both leave then you're screwed.
If you're a small startup, then sure there are no rules and it's the wild west. One dev can run the world.
This was true even before LLMs. Development has always scaled very poorly with team size. A team of 20 heads is like at most twice as productive as a team of 5, and a team of 5 is marginally more productive than a team of 3.
Peak productivity has always been somewhere between 1-3 people, though if any one of those people can't or won't continue working for one reason or another, it's generally game over for the project. So you hire more.
This is why small software startups time and time again manage to run circles around with organizations with much larger budgets. A 10 person game studio like Team Cherry can release smash hit after smash hit, while Ubisoft with 170,000% the personnel count visibly flounders. Imagine doing that in hardware, like if you could just grab some buddies and start a business successfully competing with TSMC out of your garage. That's clearly not possible. But in software, it actually is.
The tech writer backlog is probably worse, because writing good documentation requires extensive experience with the software you're writing documentation about and there are four types of documentation you need to produce.
Yes. I have been building software and acting as tech lead for close to 30 years.
I am not even quite sure I know how to manage a team of more than two programmers right now. Opus 4.5, in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing, can develop software almost as fast as I can write specs and review code. And it's just plain better at writing code than 60% of my graduating class was back in the day. I have banned at least one person from ever writing a commit message or pull request again, because Claude will explain it better.
Now, most people don't know to squeeze that much productivity out of it, most corporate procurement would take 9 months to buy a bucket if it was raining money outside, and it's possible to turn your code into unmaintainable slop at warp speed. And Claude is better at writing code than it is at almost anything else, so the rest of y'all are safe for a while.
But if you think that tech writers, or translators, or software developers are the only people who are going to get hit by waves of downsizing, then you're not paying attention.
Even if the underlying AI tech stalls out hard and permanently in 2026, there's a wave of change coming, and we are not ready. Nothing in our society, economy or politics is ready to deal with what's coming. And that scares me a bit these days.
"And it's just plain better at writing code than 60% of my graduating class was back in the day".
Only because it has access to vast amount of sample code to draw a re-combine parts. Did You ever considered emerging technologies, like new languages or frameworks that may be a much better suited for You area but they are new, thus there is no codebase for LLM to draw from?
I'm starting to think about a risk of technological stagnation in many areas.
aurareturn|1 month ago
If the business can no longer justify 5 engineers, then they might only have 1.
I've always said that we won't need fewer software developers with AI. It's just that each company will require fewer developers but there will be more companies.
IE:
2022: 100 companies employ 10,000 engineers
2026: 1000 companies employ 10,000 engineers
The net result is the same for emplyoment. But because AI makes it that much more efficient, many businesses that weren't financially viable when it needed 100 engineers might become viable with 10 engineers + AI.
SturgeonsLaw|1 month ago
ap99|1 month ago
Five engineers could be turned into maybe two, but probably not less.
It's the 'bus factor' at play. If you still want human approvals on pull requests then If one of those engineers goes on vacation or leaves the company you're stuck with one engineer for a while.
If both leave then you're screwed.
If you're a small startup, then sure there are no rules and it's the wild west. One dev can run the world.
marginalia_nu|1 month ago
Peak productivity has always been somewhere between 1-3 people, though if any one of those people can't or won't continue working for one reason or another, it's generally game over for the project. So you hire more.
This is why small software startups time and time again manage to run circles around with organizations with much larger budgets. A 10 person game studio like Team Cherry can release smash hit after smash hit, while Ubisoft with 170,000% the personnel count visibly flounders. Imagine doing that in hardware, like if you could just grab some buddies and start a business successfully competing with TSMC out of your garage. That's clearly not possible. But in software, it actually is.
matwood|1 month ago
Is the tech writers backlog also seemingly infinite like every tech backlog I've ever seen?
imtringued|1 month ago
DeborahWrites|1 month ago
ekidd|1 month ago
I am not even quite sure I know how to manage a team of more than two programmers right now. Opus 4.5, in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing, can develop software almost as fast as I can write specs and review code. And it's just plain better at writing code than 60% of my graduating class was back in the day. I have banned at least one person from ever writing a commit message or pull request again, because Claude will explain it better.
Now, most people don't know to squeeze that much productivity out of it, most corporate procurement would take 9 months to buy a bucket if it was raining money outside, and it's possible to turn your code into unmaintainable slop at warp speed. And Claude is better at writing code than it is at almost anything else, so the rest of y'all are safe for a while.
But if you think that tech writers, or translators, or software developers are the only people who are going to get hit by waves of downsizing, then you're not paying attention.
Even if the underlying AI tech stalls out hard and permanently in 2026, there's a wave of change coming, and we are not ready. Nothing in our society, economy or politics is ready to deal with what's coming. And that scares me a bit these days.
aniou|1 month ago
Only because it has access to vast amount of sample code to draw a re-combine parts. Did You ever considered emerging technologies, like new languages or frameworks that may be a much better suited for You area but they are new, thus there is no codebase for LLM to draw from?
I'm starting to think about a risk of technological stagnation in many areas.
raincole|1 month ago
amelius|1 month ago