Programming Deflation

The genies are out of the bottle. Let’s take as a given that augmented coding is steadily reducing the cost, skill barriers, and time needed to develop software. (Interesting debate to be had—another day.)Will this lead to fewer programmers or more programmers?Economics gives us two contradictory answers simultaneously.Substitution. The substitution effect says we’ll need fewer programmers—machines are replacing human labor.Jevons’. Jevons’ paradox predicts that when something becomes cheaper, demand increases as the cheaper good is economically viable in a wider variety of cases.Both can’t be right. Or can they?

Source: Programming Deflation – by Kent Beck