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My backlog is less empty than ever - it just happens to be overflowing with whispy Claude-written tickets for functionality that somebody else's Claude suggested after summarizing some other Claude-infused Slack chat.
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ofcourse not, but they can pay someone 80k a year to work on the backlog, whereas maybe they used to pay 175k. its not about work going down, its the skill set needed to complete the work is lower than ever, and they need less people than ever
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they won't even need that as agents talk to their own lanes in some Linear project management workflow that your sales team agents are connected. The entire system is going to end up agentic and even the CEO will be out of work unless they are founders and owners of the company. We'll all have our own business this way. Or it all collapses. Time will tell.
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i think this is farther off, much sooner is just the subjugation of technical workers to be low skill drivers of LLMs
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color me skeptical that the CEO or anyone non-technical is ever going to prompt their way out of a major incident when all the AI chickens come home to roost.
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Maintenance will be forever. Tax laws change annually, so the payroll app will never stop being updated.
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I don't accept that argument. As I see it, laws should be structured as data rather than code, using a clean non-Turing-Complete DSL for any embedded logic and calculations. Maybe there would still be occasional situations when new software features are needed, but it should be a rare occurrence rather than on every new change.
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> laws should be

You are comparing what it is with what should be.

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People just need to add/subtract an input box and update the tax rates. They don't need an ontology of taxes and goods.
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I'm hopeful that software will be applied in new areas where it was too costly before, with AI help it will be possible. Software will be cheaper, even more prevalent, lower quality in since respects, but SW engineering will still be a viable career.
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There are really a ton of fields where people have done an absolutely terrible job of properly using the advantages of software, even pre AI. Like, even today there are people manually drawing footprints in PCB design software, manually determining what pins carry differential signals, manually forgetting to swap RX and TX lines.. except for the functions they absolutely had to have a computer do, they forgot to move out all the drudgery and footguns and continue operating in "PDF space". It's embarrassing for a profession that is supposedly made of engineers.

PDF space is still more advanced than the people typing into "word processors" however. Making software to emulate letters was such a massive mistake for the trajectory of computing, it let people effortlessly "adopt computers" by making a digital facsimile of their terrible analog processes. Only with AI we now have the ability to digest all this unstructured mess.

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No one said there won't be work to be done, just that fewer people will be doing it.
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If the work to be done is infinite, why would there necessarily be fewer people doing it?
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Because most companies aren't software driven, they sell physical products and software is a cost center.

There is a budget and when it is gone, no contractors until next budget round.

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it could mean they are not completely out of automation opportunities, and will lose to more innovative players if won't invest into software. The end state of these companies is grid of cheap robots controlled by software.
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In a few years, it just might.

If maintenance and security is fully automated and for small changes or a small feature you will only dump some spec document into your agent platform, for sure.

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> In a few years, it just might.

If you're in a product company and your development backlog is empty, run. That company is about to go out of business.

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Just another 6 months bro, only another funding bro, I promise, all devs will be replaced bro

I have stupid question here. Why they sell tokens instead of AI generated full application and AI fixes to your code without you needing a single dev?

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Because selling shovels is more profitable than digging holes themselves.
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Yes, when the project budget runs out and contractor team has to leave.
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