@swyx: if you only learned about jevons paradox primarily wrt software demand in the age of agentic engineering, you may not h…
Summary
The tweet discusses Jevons paradox in the context of agentic engineering, suggesting that increasing efficiency of AI agents will increase demand for knowledge work rather than reduce it.
View Cached Full Text
Cached at: 07/12/26, 10:54 AM
if you only learned about jevons paradox primarily wrt software demand in the age of agentic engineering, you may not have fully internalized jevons parodox’s impact under the conditions of:
- humans who can wield coding agents well*
- coding agents breaking containment to all other knowledge work
as the efficiency of labor goes up/unit cost of knowledge work goes broadly down, the demand for total work and better knowledge goes up, not down.
what happened to coding isnt the exception; it’s the herald.
*aka AI Engineers
Sam Altman (@sama): so far at least, i’m pretty sure AI has been net job-creating.
this was not what i expected–although i was much less pessimistic than others, i thought by this level of capability we’d have seen some impact.
it is possible this direction keeps going!
Similar Articles
Quoting Andrej Karpathy
Andrej Karpathy discusses how AI-generated software is increasing demand for software, referencing Jevon's paradox.
@ssankar: Jevons paradox playing out in real time. Cheaper technology is creating more demand and more jobs. https://apollo.com/w…
Cheaper AI technology is increasing demand and creating more jobs, with no evidence of widespread AI-related job losses, according to an Apollo report.
Reverse Jevons Paradox
The author explains the reverse Jevons paradox in software engineering: when the cost of making changes rises significantly due to red tape, the total volume of changes can drop to zero, leading to a fundamental halt in incremental improvements rather than a mere slowdown.
@levie: The negative AI jobs outcome just continues to not be happening as some predicted. A large portion of enterprises I tal…
The article argues that AI is not leading to job losses as predicted; instead, companies are hiring more in new roles like engineering and sales, with Jevons paradox in effect.
Andrej Karpathy just admitted OpenAI's own researchers feel the same career anxiety we do — his actual reasoning is more useful than the doom headlines
Reflects on Andrej Karpathy's nuanced take on AI's impact on engineering careers, using the Jevons paradox to argue that cheaper code increases overall demand, and shares a personal anecdote about rule-based work versus human judgment.