Comment by AnIrishDuck

> the options are to build more software or to hire fewer engineers.

To be cheeky, there are at least three possibilities you are writing off here: we build _less_ software, we hire _more_ engineers, or things just kinda stay the same.

More on all of these later.

> I am not convinced that software has a growing market

Analysis of market dynamics in response to major technological shocks is reading tea leaves. These are chaotic systems with significant nonlinearities.

The rise of the ATM is a classic example. An obvious but naive predicted result would be fewer employed bank tellers. After all, they're automated _teller_ machines.

However, the opposite happened. ATMs drastically reduced the cost of running a bank branch (which previously required manually counting lots of cash). More branches, fewer tellers per branch... but the net result was _more_ tellers employed thirty years later. [1]

They are, of course, now doing very different things.

Let's now spitball some of those other scenarios above:

- Less "software" gets written. LLMs fundamentally change how people interact with computers. More people just create bespoke programs to do what they want instead of turning to traditional software vendors.

- More engineers get hired. The business of writing software by hand is mostly automated. Engineers shift focus to quality or other newly prioritized business goals, possibly enabled by automating LLMs instead of e.g traditional end to end tests.

- Things employment and software wise stay mostly the same. If software engineers are still ultimately needed to check the output of these things the net effect could just be they spend a bit less time typing raw code. They might work a bit less; attempts to turn everyone into a "LLM tech lead" that manages multiple concurrent LLMs could go poorly. Engineers might mostly take the efficiency gains for themselves as recovered free-ish (HN / Reddit, for example) time.

Or, let's be real, the technology could just mostly be a bust. The odds of that are not zero.

And finally, let's consider the scenario you dismiss ("more software"). It's entirely possible that making something cheaper drastically increases the demand for it. The bar for "quality software" could dramatically raise due to competition between increasingly llm-enhanced firms.

I won't represent any of these scenarios as _likely_, but they all seem plausible to me. There are too many moving parts in the software economy to make any serious prediction on how this will all pan out.

1. https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2011/06/15/ar... (while researching this, I noticed a recent twist to this classic story. Teller employment actually _has_ been declining in the 2020s, as has the total number of ATMs. I can't find any research into this, but a likely culprit is yet another technological shock: the rise of mobile banking and payment apps)