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Programmers are highly paid because of the value they bring to their employer, like every other profession, not by how much effort they put into their work.

This is also why stuff like the lawsuit against GitHub Copilot is extremely counterproductive. If AI enables you to build a full-fledged Google Docs clone in one day, your value in the labor market will go up by a lot, certainly not down.

Edited to add: Every company where layoffs have happened recently were cases where management largely squandered the value of their developers (Stripe, Lyft, pre-Elon Twitter, etc). They had the ability to build 1000x more stuff than they actually did, and are now simply paying the price. Truly innovative companies that use their developers properly will never see layoffs - I can guarantee Replit won't see any layoffs at least for the next four years.

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> If AI enables you to build a full-fledged Google Docs clone in one day, your value in the labor market will go up by a lot, certainly not down

If AI enabled everyone and their dog to build Google Docs clones in one day, you can be sure that your market value won't go up but plummet, so keep the trick to yourself.

If you could integrate relevant features of Google Docs into, say, Twitter Ad Manager, enabling an ad agency and the CMO of the corporate advertiser to collaborate (multiplayer edit, comments, real-time in-app chat, sharing links, version control) on a Twitter ad, it would drive more revenue for Twitter. As the cost in developer time of building those Google Docs goes down, building such a feature would be beneficial to Twitter.

The same applies to many other domains.

Naturally, as a programmer with increased capabilities, your value will go up.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33485483

But the key here is "if YOU could". To the extent that AI lowered the minimum requirements to build Google Docs, labour supply would increase and you would be facing a lot of competition, becoming more and more replaceable by people willing to earn as much as you -2c. Then it becomes "if WE could". Market value is not productivity.

Depends on how hard that tool is to use.

And call me small minded but I don't see much room for innovation now (that wouldn't reduce stock prices or even bankrupt the company. Heck, lots of tech companies today are still in the red)

> the lawsuit against GitHub Copilot is extremely counterproductive

The lawsuit against Copilot is about license infringement, not productivity.

If you can do more with one programmer, then you need less programmers, and demand for programmers goes down.

Did demand for programmers go down in the transitions from pure binary to assembly language, and from low-level languages to high-level languages?

It just became more feasible to build profitable products/services that solve larger products, which would increase the demand for programmers. As long as people/companies want to make more money, they will keep moving on to more ambitious projects that have just become technologically/economically feasible. In aggregate, they will not stop at the previous technological/profit level, downsize by firing all but the absolute minimum of programmers, and stay content with their stagnating income.

Business expands to the resources available. One programmer can easily deliver a basic website that worked great in the early 2000s, but same website won't cut it today.

It's not about "more", it's about accessibility. If AI makes creating software products more accessible, the demand for programmers will increase.

If programming was niche and hard to capitalize on then yeah the demand wouldn't increase if you could do "more".

HW engineers seems like a good example of this. HW has gotten tremendously better, but HW engineers haven't seem a commensurate increase in demand.

Looking forward to when 3D printing reduces upfront capital costs enough that it is feasible for a single engineer to bootstrap a profitable hardware business.

The 'GitHub for hardware' of that time would be one heck of a sight, with a huge ecosystem of interchangeable tried-and-tested hardware parts, corresponding to open source software libraries and packages today.