This definitely feels true for tech companies where the prospect of more more productive engineers improves their bottom line. The same sort of companies that have a near infinite appetite for talented engineers.

But there's a lot of coders in industries whose core business isn't technology. Knapheide for example, a truck outfitting company where my brother codes. I'd imagine in those companies, being able to do the same work with fewer engineers and less cost would lead to fewer hires. Technology isn't their core product and they aren't being held back by software.

I actually think we may see the opposite happen with those kinds of companies too.

At the moment, a truck outfitting company building a customer CRM optimized for their workflow is an absurd idea: they would need a team of a dozen developers working for a year before they could even get a feel for if it was a feasible project or not.

Add LLM assistance and maybe a team of three developers could get to an initial working version in three months.

At that point, companies that had previously ruled out custom software development entirely may find that it makes sense for them - growing the demand for software engineers as a whole.

I guess I'm skeptical how much of an impact better software could have on the business success a truck outfitting company? But maybe I'm being overly skeptical. I bet if I really got in the weeds there I'd see tons of opportunities were better/more software could really accelerate things. Thanks for checking my pessimism!