My sister always says, “worry is just a lack of imagination.” By that, she means we always seem to worry about the worst-case scenarios — about things going badly. Why not worry, or imagine, that the best possible outcome will happen? You have a choice — choose to assume that everything will work out perfectly rather than disastrously.
This has never been more true when you look at the folks who think all of us software developers are going to end up selling apples on street corners.
Don’t fear the coding agent
I get it. Software development has suddenly become incredibly efficient. Claude Code can write code vastly faster and more efficiently than we humans can, and so it seems reasonable that one person can now do (manage?) the work of 10 (50? 100?) people, companies will get rid of the other nine, leaving them destitute. Seas of software developers will be standing in unemployment lines, their skills rendered moot by the blazing tokens of coding agents.
There’s the worst-case scenario. But what if we apply a bit of imagination?
A similar case happened during the Industrial Revolution. In the mid-19th century, steam engines were the leading technology, and as they became more efficient, coal miners grew concerned that demand for their services would drop as those engines used less and less coal.
But the coal miners lacked imagination — more efficient steam engines led to the unexpected result of an increase in the demand for coal. This counterintuitive outcome was noticed by economist William Stanley Jevons, who realized that cheaper, more efficient steam engines led to their more widespread use in ways that hadn’t yet been conceived, thus expanding the need for both coal miners and factory workers to build more and better steam engines. Everybody wins.
And why won’t the same thing be true for software? Can’t we imagine a world where the amount of software demanded and produced expands beyond what we think of today? The “programmers selling apples” scenario assumes that the demand for software remains constant. But if producing software becomes more efficient, won’t that lead to more software being produced?
Think of this: I bet most of us have a few side projects that we’d like to get done that we never seem to be able to find the time for. Your product manager certainly has a long list of features for your product that she’d like to do, but for which there never seems to be the time to put on the schedule. Small businesses all have bespoke requirements for software that off-the-shelf solutions don’t meet.
Adapting to development disruption
Add to that the software that hasn’t even been conceived of yet, and it’s pretty easy to see — imagine — that there is no shortage of software that can be created. Making software easier to create won’t lead to the same projected amount of software created. Making software easier to create will drastically increase the amount of software that will be produced. The floor just dropped out from under “we don’t have the time for that.”
Now, I’ll give you this: There may be a disruption in the type of work required to produce this software. Job descriptions change — this is a constant. We used to need people to write assembly and C. Procedural development gave way to object-oriented coding. Windows developers were left behind as the web rose to prominence. But we all have adapted, and we’ll do so again.
It turns out my sister is right. The best-case scenario is vastly more interesting than anyone bothers to imagine.
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