alt Hacker NewsHow much software do you need and how many computers are there to run it on?
After combine harvester, we produced the same food with less people.
At the moment, it seems like hardware is the constraint. Companies don't have access to enough machines or tokens to keep all their devs occupied, so they let some go. Maybe that changes, maybe we already have too much software?
Personally I think we already had too much software before LLMs and even without them many devs would have found themselves jobless as startups selling to startups selling to startups failed and we realized (again) that food, shelter, security, education etc are 'real' industries, but software isn't one if it's not actively helping one of those.
There definitely isn't enough _specialised_ software. If you look at engineering tools the open source/free stuff is just not good, and the professional software packages run in the tens of thousands per user. I'm eagerly awaiting the day we get competitive open source alternatives to simulink, HFSS, autocad, solidworks, LT Spice, etc.
Unfortunately this kind of software needs specialised domain knowledge to produce that AI doesn't have yet, but when (if) it arrives I hope we see strides forwards in hardware engineering productivity.