I believe you’re arriving at the wrong conclusion because you’re comparing to an opposite instead of to someone slightly worse than you. Will this enable people at the edge to perform like you? That’s the question. Will there be more developers? Will they compete with you?

HBR is analyzing this with an old world lens. It might very well be that the effects are as they say temporarily. But the reason this is happening is because AI is in fact replacing human labor and the puppeteers are trying to remain employed. The steady state outcome is human replacement, which means AI does in fact reduce human labor, even if the remaining humans in the loop are more overloaded. The equation is not workload per capita but how many humans it takes to accomplish a goal.

If AI was indeed replacing human labor I would expect HBR to be among the first publications to cover it.

Why? I don't recall HBR ever being at forefront of a change. It seems to me that they're just good at identifying a change when it's already widespread and giving it a catchy name, and an explanatory model that they themselves can debunk in a future issue.

Agreed. Not as good a film as it was advertised to be.

Dev happiness is not the determining factor of how software will be written at scale

If you think unhappy devs are going to produce anything good then please let me know the stock ticker of your company so I can short it

It's one of the factors, especially when you consider it not just as one of the factors ethically, but also because their input is valued and if they are not happy it means something might be operationally wrong (although of course there might be a tradeoff between productivity and worker happiness)

I hate the implication that the happiness of employees is of no consequence and must be sacrificed for...whatever software is being produced.

But I guess that's nothing new.

Well said