Jevons paradox: cheaper software means more programmers, not fewer

The four decades I’ve spent building up experience and knowledge are being replaced by a chatbot. Or maybe not.

A post I wrote in 2009 about iPhone app development shows how much has changed since then.

People were just getting their hands on iPhones and had great ideas for this new touchscreen technology. The Apple tagline “There’s an app for that” encouraged a gold rush, with people clamouring to stake their claims. Some of those ideas needed months of research and development to bring to market due to the new functionality of touch, camera and mobile data.

The key point of that post was that software was expensive to develop in terms of time, knowledge and hardware, so a lot of entrepreneurs could not afford to pay for months of a developer’s time.

Using AI tooling, I recently completed a project in 4 months that was budgeted at 18 months. We had existing architecture, style and development guides in place, so the quality of the new code matched what was already there. Legacy unit tests passed and a new suite of tests was created to cover the new code and user interfaces. Previously the user interface alone would have taken months of back and forth, but with a UI framework we settled on a design that worked within the first week.

With a developer using AI, those old iPhone app projects would now be achievable.

A developer who understands the problem being solved should put in place quality control gates that the AI can’t bypass. Otherwise the AI may mark its own homework by rewriting the tests to pass the code instead of fixing the code it generated. I’ve seen this happen when the requirements are ambiguous and the AI then updates the test to fit what it decides is needed. One way to prevent this is to lock the files containing your hand-coded tests. If they need changing, a developer must check why first.

Jevons paradox

In 1994 a colleague showed me Visual Basic. It had coloured syntax, IntelliSense and drag-and-drop form design, a world away from the green screens I was used to working on. I worried that managers would end up doing the development themselves. That never came to pass. Managers had enough to do without learning to code, even if it was easier. Today more people than ever develop software.

Software development is more affordable. Small businesses that could not afford it before will now commission it. A few will build software themselves, creating new developer roles.

This is Jevons paradox. Using a resource more efficiently increases demand and total consumption.

The four decades I’ve spent building up expertise in software development have not been lost, just compressed. I have more headspace for problem solving now.

Here’s the original post from 2009 on free iPhone app development, design and hosting. Don’t judge me too harshly. I was young.