Item — HN Reader

A counter example to Jevon's paradox is writing

Arguably, with the increase in literacy, Jevon's paradox would say we need to hire more writers. Indeed, a lot more people DO write for their job.

But its not like we went from a handful of professional, full-time scribes, to 10x professional full-time scribes. Instead, the value of being just a scribe has gone down (unless you're phenomenal at it). It stops being a specialized skill unto itself. It's just a part of a lot of people's jobs, alongside other skills, like knowing how to do basic arithmetic.

Coding, like writing, becomes a part of everyone's job. Not a specialization unto itself. We will have more coders, but since everyone is a coder, very few are a captial C "Coder".

2 comments

Nobody has a need for some code. They want to steer their systems in a particular direction.

Writing unikernels will probably not be part of an accountant or plumber job.

Stupid automation and writing CSS probably won't be either, for different reasons, it's so stupid that a CSS expert was replaced yesterday

Your assertion makes way more sense than the article, and might explain why I see many excellent programmers be so averse to AI. The value of an individual programmer goes down even though the value of programming increases. The 10x scribes were probably also pretty dubious of the printing press, even though it made writing more accessible and valuable.

(Also me of two months ago would be shocked at how bullish I've become on LLMs. AI is literally the printing press... get a grip, me!)

I think the takeaway is we need a specialization beyond coding. Coding is part of the job, not the whole thing.