> “If AI makes developers twice as productive (maybe a few years down the road with GPT-6), will this additional supply of developer capacity get absorbed by existing and new demand? Or will there be half as many developers? Or will the same number of developers get paid far less than today?”
Something to remember is that every new innovation in software development only raises the expectations of the people paying the software developers.
If developers are 3x as productive, then the goals and features will be 3x big.
The reason for this is that companies are in competition, if they lag behind, then others will eat up the market.
The company that fires 50% of their staff because of “AI Assistance” is not going to be able to compete with the company that doesn’t fire their staff and still uses “AI Assistance”…
I think this hits the nail on the head. Obviously a lot of the participants in this discussion are programmers, so there is going to be a fair amount of bias where people feel like their self-worth is being attacked/devalued. That being said, from a company perspective, this should much more unlock "moving faster" than "let's rest on our laurels". Any company that has a leading position in a particular industry is currently at greater risk of upstarts achieving their feature set in a reduced amount of time. The incentive for all companies will be to find programmers who are skilled in directing and debugging AIs.
I am currently building an iOS app using GPT-4 (I don't know Swift), and am developing an awareness of what it can/can't do, and surprised that I'm moving at the speed I did when creating React Native apps. In a possibly more competitive future market for developers, it does work in one's favour if some developers resist the efficiency improvements of AI.
I agree that demand will very likely grow with expectations to absorb some of the additional capacity. But there is a limit to that because companies compete on more than just software. They also compete on price and on other things that have nothing to do with software.
If the price of software drops, it's not a given that all of the savings will be spent more and better software.
I think if the price of software drops, then there’s a huge opportunity for smaller companies to build better products for cheaper and steal market share. So more people building software.
This also means larger companies will need to build more to defend their share of the market. Meaning more people building software.
Something to remember is that every new innovation in software development only raises the expectations of the people paying the software developers.
If developers are 3x as productive, then the goals and features will be 3x big.
The reason for this is that companies are in competition, if they lag behind, then others will eat up the market.
The company that fires 50% of their staff because of “AI Assistance” is not going to be able to compete with the company that doesn’t fire their staff and still uses “AI Assistance”…