You could say this about every efficiency improvement in any field ever. If everything still had to be written in C and we didn't have fancy IDEs and access to a vast ocean of libraries, cheap services doing the work for you and returning results over an API, etc., we would need many many many times over more software devs to have everything software based in the world that we do now.

But do you think if none of these things had changed, and everyone was still doing nearly everything themselves, with a limited subset of libraries in use, writing everything in C, we would have all of these applications, services, pieces of software, etc? That all of these viable businesses employing people would still exist?

I doubt it. And like the poster from the reddit link, a lot of software devs truly did enjoy a lot of that work that they did. I've talked to plenty of greybeards who will wax nostalgic over spending months writing things that a pip install and import solve in a few seconds now.

If we double the efficiency of a team, do we fire half of them? Or do we double the amount of products we're releasing? Or double the amount of features for one product?

I think we have far more software devs today because of the advent of higher level languages, large library selections available with package managers, feature-rich IDEs, etc.

Is this always the case, for every industry? Obviously not. There are a lot fewer people making furniture by hand today than there was before automated manufacturing, and any individual only needs so many chairs. But there is, of course, still demand for hand built furniture using traditional joinery techniques.

"Art" is a big space, and I don't think that the impact will be universal across every part of it. For games in specific, I think we'll see something more like the software development side - people will make more and more unique assets vs. reusing them, we'll see the artwork be more detailed and "populated" in general. We'll see more and more smaller studios putting out work with higher quality and more art assets. Same thing for other media-related positions. And the people who are reliably selling prints for people to hang on walls, collect, etc., I think are also likely quite safe. I think people relying on twitter/instagram/etc. commissions to draw people's D&D characters or anime waifu are likely in a lot of trouble.

Do you think it takes as many people to build whatever software you want today vs in the 80s? I agree more software can be built with the improvements, but per unit of functionality, way less people are needed, or they can do it much faster, which in both cases mean you spend less of your revenue on labor, which means "less jobs".

>which in both cases mean you spend less of your revenue on labor, which means "less jobs".

You can't view things in the void like this, though. Reducing the overall cost of doing something makes it viable for more businesses, which means more jobs. We have more jobs in software development overall now because of how much more productive it is today, which opens up so many more viable use cases for it. We have more CG artists for movies, games, etc. now in large part because more efficient workflows and more powerful software have increased productivity.

Will it be the same thing with generative AI? I think so, at least for the foreseeable future.

their point is simple: during the last 20-30 years we had efficiency improvements by orders of magnitude. Still we didn't have developers jobs reduction in any way. We evolved into doing more and more high-level and high-scale jobs. So no, -10% of time needed to build the same unit of functionality won't lead to -10% reduction of workforce. It will change the scope of said workforce.

I'm sure most programmers work more than 10% faster with syntax highlighting and autocomplete. But no one says IDE replaced humans' jobs.

They did, and so did high-level languages, and not to mention the entire profession is first and foremost about automating other peoples' jobs away. Thing is, nobody is really tracking how improvements for software developers are replacing people, because this only manifests at slowing the absurdly high growth rate in this industry.

Yes they did, what are you thinking would have happened if all we had was assembly? To build any meaningful software you'd need armies of people and it'd take way longer and it wouldn't be as good.

First, this argument applies to everything from WFH adding efficiency to computers themselves being faster than ink and paper.

But that's not how the economics works out. The business can simply choose to sell 10% more content.

At some point, you saturate the market for whatever’s being produced and then prices drop and you have diminishing marginal returns for production so the economics of making more doesn’t make sense.