In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal use led to the increased consumption of coal.
As something gets more efficient more not less of it is used. This is going to happen to software. If a developer can produce more features and products witht he help of AI that will increase the demand for developers not reduce it.
Someone can reasonably ask but what if an AI is more efficient at all the aspects of making software. Designing specifications, testing the UX with customers, Unit testing, creating the backend code, the UI code, the security testing etc. Then the economics law of comparative advantage comes into play. Even if someone is better than me at everything we still produce more if I concentrate on the area they are less better than me at.
This does get into tricky areas as Moores law and software improvements means that as soon as software gets better than us at a a task it gets vastly better than us pretty soon afterward. The most recent stockfish 18 is about elo 4000. In 100 games the worlds best players would not even get one draw against it. Competitions between people and computers used to happen until fairly recently.
Henry Ford II: Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?
Walter Reuther: Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?
