alt Hacker News> A lot of the fired then make a Discord and casually replicate the company's product.
And what's going to be the result of that? Can the market really support that many competitors comfortably, and/or are you setting yourself up for business failure or Chinese-style involution and 996?
See, I want a comfortable happy life, not a stress-filled one of maximum market efficiency. AI + capitalism doesn't look like it's going to provide the former.
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The market can't support it. The value of software will trend towards zero.
The less society spends on developers, the less valuable software is. If the day comes that we employ zero developers, then software will be worth zero dollars.
And yet, software will still be fulfilling an essential part of society, it just wont be a thing people are willing to pay for. So AI will still be around, and will still be essential (because somehow we have to maintain all this software), and AI will get better and better.
Eventually any knowledge work will be worth zero. Including the C-suite--especially the c-suite!
I could imagine that someone's plan could be like this: "Our current company has more managers than developers, and the software development is very ineffective because we spend a lot of time in meetings, doing various bureaucracy, and changing things over and over again, because the managers insist on making technical decisions, etc. We could do the same thing with a fraction of the workforce, and also work from home instead of renting an expensive place in the middle of an expensive city. Then our product could be cheaper and we would could still work less and have higher salaries."
Whether this is realistic or not, I can imagine some people actually believing it.