@swyx: if you only learned about jevons paradox primarily wrt software demand in the age of agentic engineering, you may not h…

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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.

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
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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!

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