> On the other hand, if you are about to be unemployed, this is less impressive

> salesman can convince executives that it does

I tend to think that reality will temper this trend as the results develop. Replacing 10 engineers with one engineer using Cursor will result in a vast velocity hit. Replacing 5 engineers with 5 "agents" assigned to autonomously implement features will result in a mess eventually. (With current technology -- I have no idea what even 2027 AI will do). At that point those unemployed engineers will find their phones ringing off the hook to come and clean up the mess.

Not that unlike what happens in many situations where they fire teams and offshore the whole thing to a team of average developers 180 degrees of longitude away who don't have any domain knowledge of the business or connections to the stakeholders. The pendulum swings back in the other direction.

I just think Jevins paradox [1]/Gustafson's Law [2] kind of applies here.

Maybe I shouldn't have used the word "replaced", as I don't really think it's actually going to "replace" people long term. I think it's likely to just lead to higher output as these get better and better .

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law

Not you, but the word replaced is the being used all the time. Even senior engineers are saying they are using it as a junior engineers while we can easily hire junior engineers (but Execs don't want to). Jevon's paradox wont work in Software because user's wallets and time is limited, and if software becomes too easy to build, it becomes harder to sell. Normal people can have 5 subscriptions, may be 10, but they wont be going to 50 or 100. I would say we would have already exhausted users already, with all the bad practices.