Demand for Software is Different

Most things humans produce have a recognisable demand ceiling - the world will only eat so much bread, regardless of how cheap it is, and we’ll only upgrade our phones so often, no matter how nice the new models are.

If we get 10x times better at growing wheat, we don’t grow 10x more wheat, because we’re pretty close to that upper limit now - instead, we get 10x less wheat farmers, producing a similar quantity of wheat.

Software is a bit different.

Software doesn’t really have a recognisable demand ceiling. User interfaces can always be better, a server more performant, or more options added. There are whole industries left largely undigitalised and countless problems we haven’t even realised software can solve yet.

In a way, this is a retelling of Jevons Paradox: when a resource becomes cheaper or more efficient to produce, demand increases as we find new ways to use it at that lower price point.

Whenever we’ve made software development more efficient—whether through better programming languages, IDEs, libraries, frameworks, low-code tools, or AI—the result hasn’t been long-term unemployment for developers. Quite the opposite. We’ve seen more developers, paid even more, building bigger, faster, and more complex systems.

That’s why I’m bullish on AI programming tools and the future of software development jobs. Sure, the role will evolve, but software hasn’t finished eating the world yet. And until it does, there’s going to be high demand for people who specialise in solving problems with code.