> if your boring time-consuming tasks take virtually 0 time thanks to gpt, and let you focus on the 1% that’s hard, you’ve suddenly become 100x more efficient, and can thus accomplish the same job as 100 you. That means the company can now fire 99 coworkers, keeping only you, and end up with the same result.
But it means that tasks where building software would only deliver 1% of the necessary value to pay for the cost of doing it are now suddenly worth paying for, so even if your company, being a stick-in-the-mud non-innovator that is going to stay in exactly the same niche doing the same thing cut 99% of its programming staff and used the cost savings on executive bonuses and stock buybacks, a whole lot of customers (and the new and pivoting companies serving them) are going to be spending money on programmers that weren’t before, so not only will your ex-coworkers still be employed more programmers in total will be, even if their work is now mostly higher-level abstraction and wrangling LLM code generators, with the level we think of as “source code” today being touched as rarely as today’s high-level application developers touch machine code.
