Why Does Cheaper Software Raise Demand for Programs?

David Heinemeier Hansson says programmers who love building things are not under threat from AI, and there is a case for needing more builders than exist now. Coping gets hard when the only love of programming was the mechanical work of assembling logic so a program does what someone else already asked for. That mechanical process is under threat. People who studied computer science, dreamed of building, and counted on a high salary can feel a real anxiety, and his own optimism is not evenly shared.

Employment numbers are fuzzy. Some stats show more openings because AI is dramatically lowering the price of programs, so people want far more of them. That is the Jevons paradox: when the price of something falls, demand rises. Bank tellers feared the ATM because a machine could dispense cash. ATMs lowered the price of a branch, banks opened more branches, and there ended up being more tellers than before. It is not guaranteed. A 400-dollar t-shirt would leave him with two shirts. Productivity means fewer people for the same job, or more work than before. A company may cover a fixed set of tasks with a tenth the people. That is tragic for the person laid off and how an economy grows. He does not want the clock wound back to 1920 or 1950. A lot of what gets replaced was drudgery, and handing those hours to machines is, for him, the history of civilization.