Why AI Will Create A Whole Lot More Developers

This originally appeared as a post on my LinkedIn.

Everybody is talking about how AI will threaten developer jobs. But here’s the thing: there are lots of people with a vested interest in having you believe that. 🤨

My take: all engineers will become AI engineers and there will be more software developers jobs than ever before. 🚀

Lots of people are motivated to have you believe that AI is magical and totally different from anything that existed before. Marketing teams who want a second chance for their product; CEOs who want regulators to slow down their competitors.

At the end of the day, AI is just the newest platform. Like any new platform, AI supports powerful capabilities that did not exist before. And like all platforms before it, AI is going to empower a whole lot more developers.

Whenever a transformational platform comes out, it enables people to build stuff they had no business building before. I grew up during the web revolution: HTML came out when I started kindergarten. Before I learned pre-algebra, I was able to build websites public to the entire world. Later in the 90s, people realizing they could build businesses on top of websites led to the dot-com boom. This led to a lot more demand for software developers than ever before.

With this AI stuff, there’s the fear that making it easier to build software will reduce the need for software developers. Historically, this just hasn’t been true: platform shifts have led to new demand for new kinds of software, rather than fewer people building the same kinds of software. With the rise of the cloud, for instance, it no longer became necessary for companies to spend years building their own computing infrastructure. Because software shops no longer bottlenecked on the ability to hire compute and scaling experts, more businesses could become software businesses and demand for app developers increased more than ever.

As the software industry shifts to AI-first, app engineers will need to become AI engineers. Organizations that previously bottlenecked on ability to create UIs, or to do CRUD programming, will now be able leverage AI. The bad news: a whole lot of today’s developers work on creating UIs or doing CRUD programming. The good news: it’s not hard for today’s skilled developers to become AI engineers. For many software developers, it’s true that your existing skills no longer give you job security. But a clear-thinking software developer who was building great products on mobile and cloud before can leverage their domain knowledge and software intuitions to build more impactful software even faster using AI.

So far, we’re seeing AI empower more people to build more new kinds of software, instead of reducing the total number of people building the same software as before. This is great news for existing software developers. You already have experience with software and now there’s more of it to build! But buckle up; we’re in the middle of a whole lot of change. And after AI, we don’t even know yet what the next shift will be.