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My Take:

I’ve been coding professionally since ~1985. I am extremely bearish on the “software development for hire” industry, including companies like web development, app development and software development firms. And large employers like Amazon and Meta have explicitly said they’re cutting their coding headcount.

the industry as a whole is definitely contracting as a result of both AI coding as well as the increasing quality of DIY solutions like Squarespace for small-business websites.

In fact, we’ve seen this trend several times over the past two decades – when a DIY solution gets “good enough,” we as software engineers basically need to move “up the value chain” and stop trying to compete with DIY. This happened about 10 years ago with Shopify, which allows you to create a good e-commerce site with no code and a few hours of setup. In 2005, I would have charged $10k+ for a site that you can get via Shopify for less than $100/mo today. The DIY tech just didn’t exist back then, so it was costly to set up secure transactions for e-commerce sites. After Shopify was released, we generally moved away from “easy” e-commerce projects.

The same happened with Squarespace over the past few years – there are many clients who paid me $5k+ for simple marketing sites (e.g. a restaurant) where I now just tell them it’s more effective to do it themselves.

Today, we’re seeing the range of what you can “do yourself” as a non-coder expand dramatically. In fact, I see some schools teaching a lesson for AI Consultancy Project students in a couple weeks about vibe coding, which I will simplify to mean “using AI to build real software even though learned how to code just a little.”

It’s awesome, and we’re seeing a lot of students jump from “beginner tech skills” to “building real stuff for clients” without ever having to do the multiple years of study to become a software developer. Of course, there are nuances and drawbacks to this – but it is undeniable that you can build pretty good stuff solely with prompts, without needing to be an expert coder.

Previously, you had to work really hard to be good enough to do this (somewhat boring, repetitive) job, and it was often fun because you got to build stuff (or got paid really well by a prestigious company). Now, everyone can become pretty good at coding in a matter of hours, rather than years. This pushes down the value of software engineering.

While those jobs won’t totally disappear, I think it’s important to recognize that supply of coders (AI and human) is now nearly infinite. The demand may be high, but it is not infinite. That means that the cost / price / value of coding has to go down.

At some point in the near future, we will reach the maximum amount of demand for coders. Then, AI will continue to get better and fill even more of that demand. The only possible outcome of that series of events is that there will be fewer jobs and/or a lower average wage for human software engineers.