Why wouldn't we find new things to do with all that new productivity?
Anecdotally, this is what I see happening in the small in my own work - we say yes to more ideas, more projects, because we know we can unblock things more quickly now - and I don't see why that wouldn't extend.
I do expect to see smaller teams - maybe a lot more one-person "teams" - and perhaps smaller companies. But I expect to see more work being done, not less, or the same.
What new things would we do? I do contracting so maybe I'm lowest-bidder-pilled but I feel like drops in price in lean organizations sre going to eat the lunch of shops trying to make more quality software in most software disciplines.
How much software is really required to be extensible?
There is tons of stuff to do. Lots of technologies out there that need to be invented and commercialized. Tons of inefficient processes in business, government, and academia to improve.
None of this means that it will be the kinds of professional specialized software development teams that we're used to doing any of this work, but I have some amount of optimism that this is actually going to be a golden age for "doing useful things with computers" work.
I dispute technology in general. There are plenty of examples where industrialisation led to a drop in quality, a massive drop in price, and a displacement of workers.
It hasn't happened in software yet. I suppose this has to do with where software sits on the demand curve currently.
I'm imagining a few more shifts in productivity will make the demand vs price derivative shift in a meaningfully different way, but we can only speculate.
I think you are misunderstanding the point I'm making. I agree that "writing code" is likely to be commoditized by AI tools, much like past industrialization disruptions. But I think there is going to be more things to do in the space of "doing useful things with computers", analogous to how industrialization creates new work further up the value chain.
Of course it often isn't the same people whose jobs are disrupted who end up doing that new work.
Anecdotally, this is what I see happening in the small in my own work - we say yes to more ideas, more projects, because we know we can unblock things more quickly now - and I don't see why that wouldn't extend.
I do expect to see smaller teams - maybe a lot more one-person "teams" - and perhaps smaller companies. But I expect to see more work being done, not less, or the same.