Engineering in the age of Donkeycorns, pt.2
If people can ship software products that make money using AI, what happens to engineers?
The initial reaction is that there will be much less need for them.
This is assuming that everything else remains equal, namely that there will be roughly the same number of companies that need to hire software engineers. If a decent chunk of those are startups or VC-backed businesses, and they stop hiring as many engineers, there won’t be as many jobs, right?
But assuming that everything else remains equal in a brand new tech era is patently unwise. We won’t see engineering work gobbled up by AI; instead, Donkeycorns will massively expand the size of the pie.
There will simply be so many more companies and products being created. And without the need to pay back VC investors by ‘scaling’, it doesn’t matter so much if they’re niche.
Many of these companies will be able to build and get products to market without the need for software engineers, and some or many of them may even be able to make money - but at some point, optionality theory tells us they will hit a limit. AI code will be able to generate a dollar today, but to make ten dollars tomorrow, you’ll need someone who understands how to make your software more valuable.
That app will need to be able to scale to larger numbers of users; that database will need to be robust enough to protect real user data; the infrastructure will need to be in place to roll out new features and changes smoothly.
At some point, you will need precision, reliability, and the ability to make economic, technical and above all human choices based on the unique situation you and your company find yourself in.
AI simply cannot do this today, and I would argue that it will not be able to do so for the foreseeable future. I believe creativity, vision and intuition will remain the preserve of humans. But, even if one day it might, that still doesn’t mean there won’t still be plenty of need for humans to cultivate the value of software.
In the age of the Donkeycorn, we’ll need more engineers, not less.