Yes, AI Will Replace Programmers. But Only with More Programmers

The narrative that AI will eliminate programming jobs has gained significant traction in both popular media and tech world in recent years. This narrative is based on a surface-level logic that suggests as a specific job gets easier and more efficient, you need fewer people to do it. I believe this narrative is fundamentally flawed; in reality, we are entering an era where the demand for specialized technical expertise in computing and software development will likely explode.

In this blog post, I argue that we are witnessing a classic case of Jevons Paradox and AI will not decrease the demand for programmers, it will substantially increase it.

Increased Efficiency Leads to Increased
Demand: A Paradox

Named after economist William Stanley Jevons, the paradox states that as the efficiency of a resource increases, the total consumption of that resource actually rises instead of falling. Why? Because increased efficiency makes the resource cheaper and more accessible, which causes demand to explode.

In the world of programming, labor and expertise are the resources. As AI makes software development more “efficient,” we aren’t going to build the same amount of tech with fewer people, we are going to build vastly more complex software that were previously impossible.

Each time programming became easier through new technologies (e.g., from machine code to assembly, assembly to C, C to Python, Python to no-code platforms, use of IDEs, etc.) the prediction was the same: fewer programmers would be needed. And each time, exactly the opposite happened. Easier software creation didn't reduce demand for software. It revealed how impossible to fully satisfy that demand had always been.

This may sound self-contradictory and complicated, but indeed the mechanism is very simple. Easier (and cheaper) software development makes a vast range of previously uneconomical applications viable. Hidden demand floods through the newly opened bottleneck. 

When developer productivity rises, organizations don't maintain the same ambition and reduce headcount. They raise their ambition to match the new capability. A team of five with AI coding assistants doesn't produce what five engineers used to produce and then go home. They aim at what fifty engineers used to aim at. This is why IDEs didn't shrink software teams, they expanded the scope of what teams were expected to build. AI coding tools will almost certainly do the same.

So, the real question isn't “will AI take programming jobs?” It's “who is going to build all the software that AI just made economically viable to build?”

Hence, I don’t think we will see a decrease in programming work due to AI; we will see a shift toward more complex system design. 

The Great CEO Pivot: From “No More Coders” to “More Software Engineers Than Ever”

Just a year ago, the tech industry was buzzing with a bold, if somewhat ominous, prediction from major CEOs: the age of the programmer was over. Several famous CEOs publicly suggested that “the next generation wouldn't need to learn programming because AI would bridge the gap.” Fast forward to 2026, and the tune has changed dramatically. These same leaders are now signaling that “AI won't replace software engineers; it will catalyze a demand for them that we’ve never seen before.”

This pivot reflects the reality that as “commodity coding” becomes easier, the focus shifts to complex system architecture, ethical alignment, and most importantly, efficiency. As Jensen Huang recently noted, changing the tech sector's narrative on AI and programming:

“ It is a fundamental flaw that we only need a billion lines of code written. We need a trillion lines of code written. We need, you know, a little bit of code written in that, because we have the imagination of solving problems, whether it's in healthcare or science or, you know, in manufacturing and retail and just luxury living. All of the different fields that we have, we have lots and lots of imaginations of all the things that we can do.”

Huang estimated that AI has actually created more than half a million net new jobs in recent years, and pointed to data showing that demand for software engineers is measurably increasing.

In Summary

AI is not moving us toward a world with reduced demand for programmers. We are moving toward a world where every programmer needs to be an AI-assisted "Software Architect" who can design, build, trouble-shoot, and optimize large-scale complex software systems.