Simon Wardley responds, in the form of a fictional Socratic dialogue, to the question of whether LLMs and vibe coding will lead to more or fewer developers. His answer is nuanced: probably about the same number, due to the Red Queen effect. As companies compete with one another, any productivity gain will be immediately reinvested to stay competitive. Concretely, a large company will go from 30 million to over a billion lines of code, simply to maintain its position.
Wardley draws on the Jevons paradox as an explanatory framework: when a resource becomes more efficient, its consumption increases rather than decreases. Vibe coding makes code production cheaper, which will trigger an explosion in the volume of software produced, not a reduction in headcount.
The central historical analogy is that of sysadmins. When virtualization made physical server racking obsolete, sysadmins did not disappear. They transformed into DevOps Engineers and SREs, acquiring new skills: chaos engineering, continuous deployment, distributed systems. Likewise, developers will not disappear but will evolve toward roles managing "packs of agents," making structural decisions, and maintaining a chain of understanding across increasingly complex systems.
Wardley states that reading code is already unsustainable and that software engineering must transform from a craft into an engineering discipline to develop better methods of systemic understanding. The title "software engineer" will probably disappear — not because the role vanishes, but because too many executives have publicly declared these profiles no longer necessary and will not want to lose face. New titles will emerge: "Human-AI system integrator," "AI Wrangler," "Agentic Herder."
The dialogue's punchline is biting. Wardley introduces "Alice," the developer laid off on a "thought leader"'s advice. Alice will soon be rehired, more expensive, under a new title. Managerial short-termism — laying off staff to boost stock options, then jumping ship before the consequences hit — is pinpointed as the real problem. Wardley recommends retraining over layoffs, while cynically predicting that companies will not take that path.