Ask HN: Is AI Taking Software Developers’ Jobs?

Summary

A Hacker News post asks whether increasingly capable AI models, including Claude, will eventually eliminate software development as a profession. The author, a developer with about 12 years of experience, says AI has not yet made it harder to find work but worries that the profession could disappear within five or ten years. One reply argues that automation has been displacing tasks for centuries and invokes the Jevons paradox: greater efficiency can create more demand for the underlying work, provided programmers keep adapting. Another commenter says software engineers may be more in demand than ever and predicts more engineers will be employed in 2027 than in 2026. They point to small companies hiring their first engineers and to individual developers building substantially more in weeks with current tools.