I think that's a misplaced analogy.

The farmer owns the farm and benefits directly from the improvement in operating margins. A software engineer does not own the farm, only the owner would benefit from improved productivity. They're actually getting paid less per hour given they're more productive in this hypothetical.

Except that many software engineers _do_ own the farm. A large percentage work in startups where equity is a big part of the pay.

Now there's the HN bubble for you.

I would be shocked if more than a tenth of a percent of people who write code for a living work in startups, period.

Only a small minority of farm workers owned the farms they worked on even back before tractors. And the tractors didn't do much to help most of those owners either. Industrial farm equipment increased the area a single farmer can work so far beyond what he could before that it made no sense for owners of the time to each have their own equipment and most sold their land and consolidated the industry into much larger farms. Farm employment went from 90% of all workers before the industrial revolution down to a bit over 1% today in the US.

And maybe it happens to software engineers next. So what? The economy looks completely different today than it did 50 years ago, which was completely different than 50 years before that, and that shouldn't stop just because some people feel childishly entitled to do the same work for their whole lives even it if it is obsolete. I'll just change careers like I have done twice before. There's a massive shortage of electrical/plumbing/hvac contractors. There's a massive shortage of nurses / doctors that will only get worse as the population gets older. Not as cushy as my mid six figure tech job, but I have no god given right to that. And there's plenty more opportunity beyond that for anyone willing to take it, so if any other engineers want to cry about it, their tears will be wasted on me.

As someone descended from farmers on both sides (and half of my wife’s family too), I’m always amazed to see people glorifying the history of farming.

Like you said, owning farmland wasn’t as common as everyone assumes. The number of farming analogies where everyone imagines the farmer as operating a lucrative business empire on land they own is a testament to how much people manufacture historical narratives to fit their desired narratives.

The farmer enjoys greater economies of scale, and there is more food in the system, driving prices down overall. The farmer doesn’t just charge the same that they would have without the tractor.

Productivity really is good for everyone. It’s the reason quality of life has improved dramatically in the past 50 years despite real wages being stagnant to declining.

Quality of life before tractors was way, way less than today.

During WW2, the Japanese would take several weeks to make an airfield, using a large labor force with picks and shovels.

They were horrified when the SeeBees showed up with bulldozers making forward airbases operational within hours.

Prices are not really down though. Potatoes grow in the US and should have benefited from automation. But the price increase exceeded monetary inflation:

https://www.in2013dollars.com/Potatoes/price-inflation

> The farmer owns the farm

I grew up in a family with a lot of farmers and I can tell you this is not universally true.

It’s very common for farmers to have leased their farmland or fields.

I can also say we are all very much better off with farming automated on a large scale. Farming jobs were brutally difficult in the past

The tractor analogy is ancient and the economic system is entirely different.

Who is going to pay laid off software engineers to spend time on inventing anything?

Fortunately, "AI" decreases productivity in software engineering, so this question is academic. But the Atlantic should mention these issues.

> Fortunately, "AI" decreases productivity in software engineering

Citation needed.

My own experiences, just like you state your personal experiences on your blog, which (unfortunately) other entities like the NYT cite.

Today, a software engineer's time is split between writing code and reviewing code. There is only so much code a software engineer can meaningfully review in a day, without going numb and starting to skip mistakes. Taking away the "writing code" part does not increase the amount of time they can spend on reviewing the code: it's hard-bound by their human nature. So if your software engineers were already operating at the optimal level of writing/reviewing split — then they were limited by their ability to review code, not to write it. So they will stay at this frontier even if you make AI write the code.

I have found plenty of other ways to improve my productivity as a software engineer without having LLMs write a single line of production code:

- Understanding code: I can dump thousands of lines of undocumented code into a large context model and get back architectural outlines, API usage examples or even full documentation. I can also ask questions directly of the codebase.

- Debugging. The newer reasoning models are extremely good at deciphering a test failure or stack trace and pinpointing the potential causes of the bug, sending me right to the relevant code.

- Suggesting where to make edits. I've started asking models for a high level implementation plan based on the codebase and dumping in an issue thread - they frequently spot parts of the code I forgot I would need to update.

- "What should I test?" - dump in a diff and get back a checklist of branches I need to add test coverage for

At this point, if you can't find ways to make yourself more productive as a programmer with LLMs I have to conclude that you just aren't trying very hard.

If you can invent, build, operate, or fix useful things, there will always be someone willing to pay you.

Debugging a car is very similar to debugging code.

> Who is going to pay laid off software engineers to spend time on inventing anything?

Over my career, I've known many software engineers who were laid off. The ones I kept track of:

1. got another job, sometimes in another field

2. started their own business

3. retired

4. became a consultant

That worked back when employers actually had to compete for labour, or unions were strong enough to negotiate with them on equal terms. Now productivity gains go entirely to the holders of capital.

Proof that employers compete for labor lies in every job where the pay exceeds minimum wage.

They compete, but the level of competition has gone down and the share of income labor gets has decreased as a result.

> the share of income labor gets has decreased as a result.

Does it? ROI stays generally about the same.

The reason is simple: highly profitable businesses attract competition, causing their prices to fall.

It does, at least according to the statistics and research we have. Labor share of income has been decreasing during the last few decades. The reason is also simple: without strong interference from governments, markets have a tendency to concentrate and form monopolies. Winners are rewarded with more advantages over their competitors, and over time one or two winners will emerge and get large enough that it's near impossible to compete with them, even if the competitors can resist the urge to get rich quick by selling the business to the dominant players.

Capital also has a much easier time organizing politically than the poor masses, so over time the government will also introduce policies that benefit capital over labor, as we can very clearly see.

Not everything is a tractor. Sometimes it’s a gun or a Pinto.

just don't look at how farming in america is going when this extends too far though

DDG: john deere drm

Meta: I wish HN had the option to hide comments by certain accounts. Too many trolls these days that just generate noise.