“will software developer jobs be destroyed by ai?” a friend of mine, a software developer, asked this in a whatsapp group full of other developers.
one answer came fast, from another friend: a former developer, now an ai expert by profession.
junior developers aren’t being hired anymore. the ten-person software teams are now five-person, because juniors are eliminated. current reasoning models are eliminating the mid-level positions. next will be the elimination of senior positions with the ai agents being developed right now. the last step is eliminating tech leads, team leads, and product owners with fully autonomous agents.
so we’re done here, right? easy, fast, simple.
my answer? not really.
i’m not going to fact-check every part of that statement. but let’s take two specific claims.
“ten-person teams are now five, because nobody hires juniors”
this sounds more like an anecdote than a market trend.
my own team size hasn’t changed, and i haven’t heard from a single real person who’s lived through a major shift. two weeks ago i hired a junior developer myself, for a hobby project.
there’s no broad industry data pointing to a mass elimination of junior roles. some companies may slow hiring; others still bring juniors on.
“reasoning models are eliminating mid-level engineers”
i write code every day, and i use the latest ai coding tools, paid and unpaid, every day too.
here’s my experience: they’re useful for specific tasks, and they speed you up if you know how to use them and know their limits.
so is ai eliminating mid-level engineers right now?
my answer: wrong question.
the right question is: “is ai giving mid-level developers a 10–20% productivity boost over a two-week sprint?”
my answer: if you’re fluent with the tools, probably yes, but only on some kinds of coding tasks.
i’ll skip the ai-agents part, and the senior and lead elimination. you can probably already guess why.
what i think ai will actually do
i think it will have a counterintuitive effect.
remember when people thought atms would be the beginning of the end for bank tellers? the opposite happened: the number of teller jobs kept growing for two more decades.
why? because the atm cut the cost of running a branch. it suddenly made financial sense for banks to open more branches across more cities, and a boom in demand for bank employees followed.
i think something similar happens to software.
the software industry will grow so much over the next decade that we’ll have an order of magnitude more developer jobs than we do now.
why? because ai lowers the total cost of building software by cutting the time developers spend building it.
the company (or business, or individual) who couldn’t afford to hire a team to build something over six months will be able to build the same thing in four weeks for less than a sixth of the cost.
ai widens access to software development. far more people can afford it, so far more people start paying for it, money that otherwise never would have entered the industry. and the whole market grows with it.
we’ll have 100–1000× more software than we have today.
that’s my answer to “will software developer jobs be destroyed by ai?”
i’d love to hear your thoughts.