The Jevons Paradox and the Future of Software Development

There’s an old economic observation from 1865 that keeps showing up in conversations about AI and the future of programming. William Stanley Jevons noticed that when James Watt’s more efficient steam engine made coal cheaper to use, England didn’t consume less coal — it consumed dramatically more. Efficiency didn’t reduce demand. It exploded it. We’re living through the software version of that story right now. The anxiety in developer communities is understandable. Large language models can write working code, debug errors, scaffold entire applications, and do it all in seconds. If the thing you spent years learning can now be partially automated, the rational fear is that your labor becomes less valuable. The pessimistic version of the story ends with mass unemployment for programmers and a hollowed-out profession. But the Jevons paradox suggests something different might happen — and history offers a useful analogy. YouTube and TikTok didn’t destroy professional film crews. What…