In 2020, there are two companies that are competitors with each other. They each employ 100 programmers to do their job, and we all know how those organizations operated; perpetually behind, each feature added generating yet more possible future features, we've all lived it and are still largely living it today.

In 2026, both companies decide that AI can accelerate their developers by a factor of 10x. I'm not asserting that's reality, it's just a nice round number.

Company 1 fires 90 of their programmers and does the same work with 10.

Company 2 keeps all their programmers and does ten times the work they used to do, and maybe ends up hiring more.

Who wins in the market?

Of course the answer is "it depends" because it always is but I would say the winning space for Company 1 is substantially smaller than Company 2. They need a very precise combination of market circumstances. One that is not so precise that it doesn't exist, but it's a risky bet that you're in one of the exceptions.

In the time when the acceleration is occurring and we haven't settled in to the new reality yet the Company 1 answer seems superficially appealing to the bean counters, but it only takes one defector in a given market to go with Company 2's solution to force the entire rest of their industry to follow suit to compete properly.

The value generation by one programmer that can be possibly captured by that programmer's salary is probably not going down in the medium and long term either.