"Yes", with AI, one engineer can now do the work of two (or more). "No", that doesn’t mean we’ll need fewer engineers or that demand for engineers will drop. People often connect these two ideas as if they’ve uncovered some “productivity hack.” Thoughout the history, whenever the production capacity increased, the businesses made more money, hence poured more money back into the business to ..... yes, make more money. Now with AI, why do we assume that the demands of engineers will reduce if their production capacity has increased? Isn't it counterintuitive? If the same number of engineers can produce better and bigger software systems, faster, that'd mean businesses: - won't have to wait years to get their systems live - can run various proof of concepts in parallel, choose the ideas that worked, and start investing right away in them - can go live way sooner, start seeing positive impact right away, and start investing more to scale these systems globally across their business Does any of these outcomes sound like something that'd cause businesses to hire fewer engineers? Not to me. But yes, there are some cases where the demand will drop: - when they lack future vision of their product and don't know what to do after their initial idea comes to life - when they fail to operationalise the systems that engineers built, made a loss on their investment and shut down their operations - when they fail to market (which is the cause of failure of most startups), figure out they can't run their products, and shut down What's the common pattern in these cases? They all lacked proper vision and thought that software could solve their problems. When in fact, it was never the software. They needed to fix their operations and marketing first. So do I think the demand of software engineers is at risk anytime soon? I don't really think so. Though I wouldn't be surprised if things change in the next few months or years.
Completely agree, productivity gains rarely shrink an industry; they expand its possibilities. AI won’t make engineers redundant, it will make ambitious roadmaps achievable. The constraint will shift from coding speed to business vision.
Yep, demand always floats to wherever there's momentum and vision, not just tools. AI is more like pouring rocket fuel on whatever direction a team is already pointed in. Seen way more projects stall out from fuzzy goals or not having marketing ops ready than from a lack of engineers.
That was the best way how you connected the dots Hashir Baig AI lets one engineer do the work of two, but that doesn’t mean fewer engineers are needed. Faster development = more experiments, quicker launches, bigger systems. That usually means more work, not less. From my experience building AI systems on AWS and GenAI stacks, the real challenge isn’t coding, it’s having clear vision and operational discipline. Teams fail when they lack direction or can’t execute, not because engineers aren’t needed. AI changes how engineers work, but it doesn’t replace them.
History has shown us that every leap in productivity fuels more innovation, not less. As businesses realize they can build, test, and scale faster, the real differentiator will be vision knowing what to build next and how to operationalize it.
Software Engineer
2wThe goal of A(G)I is increased production with the least resource ( human efforts) involvement. The production of software will increase, businesses will make more money reducing the human efforts not just in engineering but most aspects of our day to day work.