Will the number of software engineers grow or shrink as AI writes most of the code?

Immad Akhund · May 12, 2025

AI productivity gains for engineers will lead companies to hire more engineers, not fewer, because ambition expands to fill the new capacity.

If his engineers get more productive he will just come up with more things to do — he has infinite ambition — so productivity unlocks more work rather than constraining hiring.

Scope: acknowledges this may be a contrarian view; reasoning drawn from his own company's ambition level

27:14 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund

Severin Hacker · May 19, 2025

AI coding tools will lead to far more software and far more people creating software, not fewer

The tools lower the barrier to entry and lower the cost of producing code, and by Jevons' paradox falling cost of a good increases demand for it

Scope: uncertain whether those people will be called software engineers or touch code directly

13:20 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker

Micha Kaufman · Jun 9, 2025 · hedged

Fiverr will probably have more engineers in five years, not fewer, despite AI productivity gains

Technology levels the playing field because everyone has it — if you can squeeze 3x out of each person, so can your competitors, so the way to do more and move faster is more people; speed is one of the biggest strengths in an uncertain market

Scope: 'probably'

43:47 20VC: Fiverr CEO: 'If You're Not Adapting to AI, F* You. You're Done | Why "Time to Copy" is the Most Important Metric in Startups Today | Why 99% of AI Companies Today Will Die | Why Governments Will Take Control of AI with Micha Kauffman

Anton Osika · Aug 18, 2025 · hedged

Engineering teams at the best companies will grow rather than shrink, with engineers acting as a translation layer thinking like product managers

There is higher elasticity of demand for such engineers — companies will realize more engineers means doing even more, even faster, talking to customers and shipping changes with AI

Scope: specific to the best companies

36:04 20VC: Lovable CEO Anton Osika on $120M in ARR in 7 Months | The Honest Truth About Defensibility and Unit Economics for AI Startups | The State of Foundation Models: Long Grok, Short OpenAI, Why | Replit vs Lovable vs Bolt: What Happens

Brendan Foody · Sep 15, 2025

Mercor will have more engineers in five years, because AI will amplify engineers' productivity and value rather than diminish it

Engineering is a highly elastic role — make engineers 10x more efficient and you'd build 100x more software, features and algorithm iterations

Scope: especially true in domains like software engineering

40:03 20VC: Mercor: From $1M to $500M in 17 Months: The Fastest Growing Company in the World | How to Think About Margins and Revenue Sustainability in AI | Why Evaluation Benchmarks in AI are BS Today with Brendan Foody

Jesse Zhang · Sep 19, 2025

Decagon will have dramatically more engineers in five years despite AI writing about half its code

At their stage they cannot get enough engineers and are hiring extremely fast

31:25 20VC: Why 90% of Founders Build Startups Wrong | Why AI Growth Rates are Sustainable & Remote Work is BS and the AI Talent War | Competing with Brett Taylor and Sierra: Who Wins the Customer Service War with Jesse Zhang, Decagon

Mike Cannon-Brookes · Oct 13, 2025

Five years from now companies like his will employ more software engineers than today, and those engineers will be more efficient and create far more.

Scope: about his own company and companies like it

0:00 20VC: Atlassian CEO on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble | Do Margins Matter & Does Defensibility Exist in an AI World | Is Per Seat Pricing Dead & The Future of Vibe Coding with Mike Cannon-Brookes

Miles Grimshaw · Sep 18, 2023

Every engineer will become an AI engineer, expanding the practitioner base from hundreds of thousands of ML scientists to tens of millions of application engineers

ML had been reserved for ML wizardry — separate teams tuning models and weights, tools like Hugging Face built for them — but AI is becoming part of every application engineer's thinking

Scope: thesis formed mid-2022 and, in his view, proving out

44:07 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate

Varun Mohan · Jun 2, 2025

The word 'engineer' will become flexible: a spectrum will emerge from people operating purely on natural-language abstractions to specialists who can go into the weeds, and far fewer people will need to go deep than today

Abstraction has continually risen from assembly to C to Java to JavaScript, and today's JavaScript writers can't write assembly; AI tools can explain the stack to non-experts so they remain valuable

Scope: depends on the type of company

32:05 20VC: Windsurf Founder on Will Model Companies Own the App Layer | Why Moats Do Not Exist in a World of AI | Why the Notion of Single Person $BN Companies is BS | Lovable vs Bolt & Cursor vs Windsurf: How Does it All End with Varun Mohan

Cem Kansu · Jun 20, 2025

Companies will employ more engineers in five years, but the definition will shift toward a hybrid 'prototyper' role blending engineer, designer and PM, and that is where headcount growth will come from

Software engineering is a tightly defined discipline today; the growth will be in undefined builders who use AI tools really well

Scope: initially said he honestly didn't know before being pushed for a take

21:36 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo

Mike Cannon-Brookes · Oct 13, 2025

A large group of non-engineers will build their own technology to meet real design, security and quality standards, and whether we call them software developers is an unhelpful debate

Finance people will vibe code an app to solve their own problem where they previously used Excel, filed an IT ticket, or didn't bother; marketers making websites is the same pattern

Scope: depends on the definition of vibe coding

29:07 20VC: Atlassian CEO on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble | Do Margins Matter & Does Defensibility Exist in an AI World | Is Per Seat Pricing Dead & The Future of Vibe Coding with Mike Cannon-Brookes

Jonathan Siddharth · Dec 1, 2025

There will be more software engineers in ten years, because the definition of software engineer expands to anyone who can build software that solves a real problem

Domain experts like an oncologist with an app idea will be able to build working software, so the pool of builders extends far beyond computer science graduates

Scope: depends on defining software engineer by capability to build, not by degree

51:26 20VC: Scale, Surge, Turing, Mercor: Who Wins & Who Loses in Data Labelling | Is Revenue in Data Labelling Real or GMV? | Why 99% of Knowledge Work Will Go and What Happens Then? | Why SaaS is Dead in a World of AI with Jonathan Siddharth @ Turing

Amjad Masad · Mar 10, 2023

AI will significantly slim down engineering teams without putting software engineers out of work, because smaller engineering organizations will be able to have far more impact

The business-logic share of work goes from 20% to nearly all of the job, so far fewer engineers are needed per unit of impact

Scope: fewer engineers needed overall

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Zach Lloyd · Oct 17, 2025

In five years dev teams will have fewer, more senior engineers who manage the work of many agents

19:43 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp

Jean-Michel Lemieux · Mar 20, 2024

There will be far more software development work, not less, because sectors like healthcare, agriculture and education have been massively underinvested in technology

We have a shortage of programmers relative to the problems that need solving, and AI makes serving those underserved domains more possible

44:26 Underserved sectors like healthcare and education create far more software work not less

Jean-Michel Lemieux · Mar 20, 2024 · speculative

Companies will 'unbloat' and programmers will be redistributed from consumer ad and social products to agriculture, healthcare, education and renewable energy

Global decline in birth rates means fewer people available to build technology, while the set of problems technologists can be pointed at keeps growing

45:52 Declining birth rates force redistribution of programmers toward underserved domains

Johannes Reck · Jun 23, 2025

GetYourGuide will have more engineers in five years, but far fewer than previously planned

Productivity gains per engineer will be massive

69:19 Productivity gains mean more engineers but far fewer than previously planned