This is a bit sensationalist of course. But the notion that AIs are enhancing developer productivity is real. I use LLMs for different tasks with coding. Is it perfect or amazing? No. Does it save me time. Yes. Document this code; write me test for x. Cover these cases as well. Give me some quick feedback on what I just wrote. Did I overlook anything? Etc. If you look at my chatgpt history, I'm constantly interrogating it about whatever I'm working on. That saves me a lot of time. It's a productivity enhancer.

Of course the history of computer science is that we've had a continuous stream of productivity enhancing things that helped us become more productive. Whenever that happens, what doesn't happen is a decline in demand for programmers. As what we do becomes cheaper or easier, people want more of it. So far, there's little sign of demand for programmers declining. If anything, it's now so easy that lots of non programmers start getting their hands dirty as well. And why not? That just frees me up to do a bit higher level, more interesting stuff. A lot of programming work is tedious and repetitive. Getting some help with that is very welcome as far as I'm concerned. That just means I can build whatever I have in my head faster. So, it costs less for whomever is buying that. So, they might get back for some more; or raise the ambition level a bit. It's not a zero sum game.

The second thing that the article brought up (outsourcing) is an interesting one. Because they missed one important thing that LLMs also do: which is translating. Outsourcing programming work has been historically hard because of language barriers. Miscommunication due to people not speaking each other's language very well is a big challenge. You can make it work but it takes a bit of effort. I've worked with people that I can barely understand or that barely understand me. It's tedious and frustrating if you can't understand each other.

That language barrier is melting away as translating between languages gets easier. We're not quite at the babelfish level just yet but you can get pretty close if you have some patience. Meetings can get transcribed & subtitled (imperfectly) and those transcriptions can be translated. Anything in text form is easy to translate into whatever. In short, we still have cultural barriers but the language barriers are becoming less of a hurdle. The quality and speed of the translations keeps getting better. Real time conversation translations are basically no longer science fiction. And the quality of the translations is more than good enough for a lot of things now. Certainly better than two non native speakers trying to speak English with each other (I'm not a native speaker).

The value of hiring locally is mainly in that you can communicate with people directly. And that's just hard if you don't speak the same language. But that's not going to be as big of a deal as it used to be. The value of being local is still there but it's worth less.

The two added together means a vast increase in the number of programmers. But also in the number of customers. There are a lot of growth economies in the world. And they are all going to need programming work done. And they will want to hire the best they can afford and won't be hiring locally necessarily. We're not talking impoverished third world countries here either.

So, I'm not that worried. The opposite actually.