[Me & X] Does LLMs / vibe coding mean more or fewer developers?
X: Does LLMs / Vibe coding mean more or fewer developers?
Me: Probably about the same. You'll get transitional effects but enterprises are in competition with each other, so the red queen effect kicks in and any "savings" diminish. In short, your average large enterprise will go from 30 million lines of code to around a billion+ in order to stand still.
X: We need developers to write this?
Me: No. But you will need people with the skills to manage the swarm of agents that do, to sustain these ever more complicated environments, to make structural decisions and maintain some chain of comprehension over what is happening. Those practices are co-evolving. It's no different from when sysadmins stopped racking servers and started managing larger virtual environments. New skills were needed - chaos engines, continuous deployment, distributed system etc. Of course we didn't call them sysadmins but DevOp Engineers or SREs.
X: Jevons Paradox?
Me: Good enough comparison. What matters is the competition effects, new industries, new needs and componentisation that drives this. We're unlikely to call these people software engineers (though that is what they are), we will call them something else.
X: Such as?
Me: I'm lousy at naming. Think AI wranglers, Agentic Herders but someone will come up with a fancy name that makes no sense.
X: Why not software engineers?
Me: Ditto "why not call them sysadmins" ... too many senior folk made bold claims that sysadmins would not be needed. They didn't want to lose face. No different with software engineers.
X: We will still need people to read code?
Me: No. Reading code is not sustainable already. At a billion lines of code, it becomes a ridiculous notion. There are better pathways to understanding than this which begin with changing software engineering into an engineering discipline rather than a craft.
X: But why do people think software engineers are going?
Me: The title probably is, not the role. The confusion kicks in as people think the role is reading & writing code. This is like thinking the role of sysadmins was racking servers and cabling. Hence a title change might not be a bad thing. And it comes with benefits.
X: Such as?
Me: As these practices co-evolve, as new ways of working establish then the demand for "Human-AI system integrator" will skyrocket. Same with DevOps. See slop.
X: What's a "Human-AI system integrator"?
Me: Alice.
X: Alice?
Me: The software engineer you fired because a thought leaderer said you no longer needed them.
X: Isn't she a software engineer?
Me: No! Well, yes but don't tell anyone. That's the past. Anyway, Alice costs more these days until things settle down.
X: I can't tell the board to rehire people I've fired.
Me: Next time, try retraining. Except, you won't.
X: Why?
Me: I'd guess that firing gives you a bump in share option value and you can always move on before the trouble hits. I feel sorry for your replacement but that's their problem, not yours.
Originally published on LinkedIn.