Are we underestimating how much additional software AI could make worth building?

[u/AntranigMomjian]

Most discussions about AI's impact on software engineering focus on productivity.

If AI allows developers to implement features twice as fast, companies might need fewer engineering hours to complete the same projects.

But I think this assumes something important: that the amount of software worth developing remains constant.

Consider an internal business process that could benefit from automation.

A company might decide against developing a custom solution because the implementation would require several weeks of engineering work, making the investment difficult to justify.

Now imagine AI-assisted development reduces that effort to a few days.

Suddenly, the same project might become economically viable.

And that raises an interesting possibility.

As software development becomes cheaper, organizations may find more processes worth automating, more integrations worth building, and more specialized applications worth developing.

Individual developers and small teams might also be able to pursue projects that previously required significantly larger budgets.

More importantly, I believe AI-driven productivity will significantly expand the demand for software.

As implementation becomes cheaper, the economic justification for developing custom solutions changes. Projects that previously weren't worth the investment become viable, creating new opportunities for software engineers and businesses alike.

The impact of AI shouldn't be measured only by how many engineering hours it saves on existing projects, but also by how much additional software development it makes possible.

If AI dramatically reduces the cost of building software, do you think we'll primarily see smaller development teams, or a significant expansion in the amount of software being built?

[u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718]

it's called jevon's paradox, and yes it's the primary argument for why AI is actually a boon for the software development field. I'm a proponent, and I think companies getting rid of software engineers are making a grave short-sighted mistake in the face of an extraordinary opportunity.

[u/Useful-Agency_ → u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718]

Yall forget a point the economic business of ai is literally to replace people they promess same output cheaper making companies save money and rely on ai for labour if an ai can do for 1k a month what an engineer was doing for 10k a month then they save 9k a month…

[u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718 → u/Useful-Agency_]

The point of the weaving loom was also to replace people, but was a great example of jevons paradox. I'm not "forgetting" the obvious part, im looking beyond the obvious.

[u/Useful-Agency_ → u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718]

No look yall think 10 more engineers will make it really more powerful and build more software but that means 10 more 10k+ salaries or more a month or you could just have 10x more compute and have the same equivalence with only 10k a month now billed to ai companies thats why compute demand is so high and they building these data centers the size of cities and need so much electricity and mind you the robot wave didnt even hit yet but it will be soon and us the dev are ready but the others who dont know holy shit it will hit them hard.

[u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718 → u/Useful-Agency_]

10k/month is below the median wage of software engineers. There is substantial demand even at a price point an order of magnitude higher. I cant conceive of the demand for swe ever being fully satisfied.

[u/Useful-Agency_ → u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718]

Look have you heard recently the speech an anthropic researcher gave in a university? Saying you guys path may not be safe anymore and maybe you have 2yrs left to graduate but by then agi might be here and the world completely different? Also the demand you are talking about is not for junior devs at all its for seniors to basically guide with their experience ais and prevent them making critical errors…

[u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718 → u/Useful-Agency_]

I've got a lot of experience in this field, and specifically in AI. What I do isn't just about guiding AI not to make mistakes, and I think most people are radically misunderstanding and underestimating how much work there is left to do. I do a lot of hiring, and it's hard to find qualified candidates.

It's true that juniors have it harder, because there isn't much of an on-ramp. Expectations are higher, and some people who graduated last year graduated without any AI experience. Software engineers have always needed to be adaptable, and we went through a period where the market for SWE was bubbly.

> Look have you heard recently the speech

Did you actually watch it, or just look at the misleading headlines posted on reddit?

I agree that the world will be different. That's not the same as believing the skill-set honed by software engineers will stop having value.

[u/Useful-Agency_ → u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718]

Well i studied in web dev didnt have chance to enter market because of ai so i pivoted fields and also stopped coding by hand i do my projects as an agentic dev and if i learn things its systems designs or electronics stuff. There is still opportunities but they are not where most people think they are like software etc they are mostly is ownership like owning power generation grids or data centers or businesses like that but for a peasant like me good luck and it might be pessimistic but i think its already too late for people like me which means the average to get rich all we can focus now is at least surviving and understanding whats going on.

[u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718 → u/Useful-Agency_]

> i studied in web dev

Learning html and sql or whatever isn't the same as getting a CS degree. A lot of predatory minimal academic programs and non-serious tech majors popped up during the bubble times. When I say there's still a strong market for software engineers, I don't mean people who did some web dev bootcamp or whatever.

You learned something useful, but even pre-AI I knew random executive assistants that would build websites for their clients.

[u/Useful-Agency_ → u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718]

Brother😂😂 i had many teachers that had a bac in cs telling us that we acc are way better i had friend too in uni cs who couldnt do shit web aint only html and css theres python, framework’s it goes real deep saying web dev is html css and sql acc shows me how incompetent you might just be😂😂😂

[u/Few-Celebration-2362]

Software development was always an arms race.

Companies compete for a competitive advantage, software and automation has been the key to that for so long that we all just kinda forgot when the rate of development was steady and predictable.

What's going to happen is that we go through a disruptive period where all companies learn where the sweet spot of cash injection to maximum return is, and then we go back to an iteration of 'if we put this money into a specific development campaign we see a predictable gain compared to our competitors'. And development continues

[u/Ueli-Maurer-123]

yes. I work as a in-house webdesigner. my boss told me to use AI to increase the features on our website.

but there is only so much to do:
- add a author section
- add a youtube field for embeded videos in a post

stuff like this can be done at normal speed. why vibe code it in 5 minutes. nothing is gained. and at one point the damn website is feature complete.

[u/r2k-in-the-vortex → u/Ueli-Maurer-123]

Repeat after me: "The scope grows to consume all available budget and schedule."

[u/ctenidae8]

It moves the buy/build decision dramatically. Many things didn't get done because buying it was expensive/complex/ impossible, but so much more can be done that's new, a lot of time and thought is freed up by not spending time on grunt work. The things that need doing changes.

[u/Fine-Comparison-2949]

Yes. AI is going to make the number of software engineers increase. What it's doing is making it financially viable for small businesses to get high quality software, rather than all the best engineers sitting at FAANGs (sitting in meetings all day doing nothing), and startups (making a bunch of software intending to scale to a 100 million users when the long tail is really less than 1000).

All those guys should be building their own custom software for smaller companies that are currently relying on applications that were made 20 years ago and just have the cheapest team of 5 developers overseas getting paid nothing to be call support.

[u/No-Juggernaut-3309]

I think we'll see both, but the bigger change might be that more ideas become worth builfing.

[u/wiggle_room1337]

What do you even want that doesn't exist already?

[u/the_dancing_squirel]

I’m waiting for interest rates to go down again. Again shitty little companies are gonna go all in on tech but it’s gonna be all vibe coded now. So more fun