How Copilot will lead to hiring more developers, not less

2024-04-13

"Second order effect" is just another way of saying "Oops."

(An earlier version of this post got out of hand, so I'll just sketch it.)

The economics-minded reader will have seen this coming a mile away, and will already know the overall impact once the dust settles:

This isn't a contrarian pitch - it's the way this sort of technological impact usually goes. Copilot isn't an industrial robot, it's Excel: a huge productivity booster in the right context, but cheap and easy enough to use that if you use it in your job you aren't paid more for the extra productivity, you're required to use it in order to have a job at all.

A hopeful note for those who enjoy writing software and would like to be paid well to do it is that LLMs are very very bad at understanding the world. They are very good at coming back with plausible answers to common questions, but the more you start making novel questions that combine ideas and explore hypotheses, the more obvious it becomes that they are just making stuff up. It's not bad engineering: they are linguistic models, making stuff up on the go is what they do.

If the value you add is not mainly in implementing a solution but in understanding a part of the world well enough that you can come up with a novel one, that's a skill you'll still be able to charge well for. In a way it's a return to an older view — although always more aspirational than real — of computer programming as an intellectual tool to think about problems, not the problem we have to figure out.

To end up on a curmudgeonly note, I consider even the short-term impact of coding assistants a negative from a software quality point of view: so far I've seen it lead to code that's written faster (good), is less well understood by the developers (bad), tends to be longer (bad), and is less conceptually elegant (very bad). It gets feature request tickets done faster at the cost of maintainability, system integrity, and cumulative knowledge development.

In short, it's going to be an absolute hit across the industry.