if enterprises require fewer software engineers, medium/small companies will have access to a higher quality software engineering.

If software engineers are more effective, I would expect there to be more software engineers. They’ll put out more and better code. More code means more engineers.

The contrary view is like saying gold miners are finding more gold, and it’s easier than ever, so we expect folks are going to leave town.

If your assertion was true, we would see a hiring boom across the board, instead of mass layoffs and hiring freezes throughout our industry

LLMs aren't the cause of mass layoffs and hiring freezes. The end of ZIRP, uncertainty in the macro and offshoring are the cause. AI is just something executives like to say recently when they do layoffs ("we'll be more efficient with cutting edge technology!").

I think there's real pressure from investors to show that some of your human costs will be going away.

After all most of those investors are deeply invested in AI technology already. At the valuation, they need to be able to show that it replaces human workers because that's the specific kind of greed that is driving the value of the stock.

And if you see your competition tighten their belt then you should tighten yours right? So without proof companies are acting like they can use a small number of human-ai hybrid workers. There's strong peer pressure to think that way as a direct result of AI

Someone, maybe it was Duolingo basically said: medium stuff is now easy, hard things are now expected of you.

That's fair, but enterprises are often naive and prone to groupthink.

It was just a few years ago when automakers and rental car companies unanimously decided (has they had been told to decide) that COVID-19 would reduce demand for cars. They cut production, sold off fleets, and almost immediately found themselves unable to keep up with demand.

Enterprises won't require less software. If they require fewer software engineers, that would be those few engineers producing so much more software with better tools, for example, AI wrappers.

Yeah but we can already see that it doesn't work like that.

If you need to write a lot of code I guess, but that's really rare, like saying "I need to write a lot of laws. I need to write 50 new laws by Tuesday with at least 15000 words of new regulation to one-up my rival legislator who wrote 40 new laws last week"