Or a massive increase in the amount of software that gets written.

If the cost of writing software goes down, demand for it will presumably go up...

I would guess it's most likely both. The world could use a lot more software but it's not an unlimited appetite and the increase in productivity of SWEs will depress wages.

Just like chainsaws depressed the wages of lumberjacks, and cars decreased the need for people to move around.

Only if there is something for that software to do.

How many places have you worked where there's no backlog in Jira and the engineers legitimately have nothing to do other than sit around waiting for work to get assigned ‽

> that means a massive reduction in software engineers

That's exactly what everyone is hoping for. Well, everyone except software engineers, of course

Define everyone. I know a lot of SWEs who don't take their job for granted, always strive to add value, and try to keep skilled constantly and try to be extremely helpful. Maybe in SV where the salaries are high there is some schadenfreude but I don't see that on general for what is a worldwide industry. In most places it's just a standard job.

I don't understand the pleasure of putting people out of work and the pain on people's lives and careers but I guess that's just me.

The valuable skills will be creativity, taste, curation, prioritisation etc.

All those skills can be applied to engineering as well. What makes Fabrice Bellard great? Its not just technical skill I think.

I think some of the most successful people will be a subset of engineers but also Steve Jobs types and artists

Most companies don't care about developers of their level, rather they offshore to the lowest bid.

Except that AI agents are the new offshoring. The new hotshot developer will be someone who understands what clients want deeply, knows the domain, has sufficient engineering skill to understand the system that needs to be built and is able to guide swarms of coding agents efficiently.

Having all this in one person is super valuable because you lose a lot of speed and fidelity in information exchange between brains. I wouldn't be surprised if someone could hit like 30-50 kloc/day within a few years. I can hit 5-10kloc/day doing this stuff depending on a lot of factors, and that's driving ~2 agents at a time mostly. Imagine driving 20.

I know how it feels, because I have been in enough projects driving offshoring teams.

Here is an unwanted advice, it is not going to be the new hotshot developer, rather hotshot technical and solution architects.

The dream of CASE tools is finally here, pump the requirements into the software factory (aks instruction files), and the replicator handles the rest.

You can't just be a solution architect, you have to be a systems architect, which is sort of the culmination of the developer skillset. I don't write code anymore really, but I know the purpose of everything my agents are doing and when they're making mistakes. I also have to know the domain, and be able to interact with clients, but without the technical chops I wouldn't be able to deliver on the level that I do.

Yes.

How hard do you really think the job of “technical product manager” is? I'm not asking in a childish "management doesn't do anything" sort of way, but want to frame the question "if software engineers needed to retrain to be technical product managers, how many would sink, and how many would swim?