What is happening to software has happened before, to every trade that ever got cheaper, and it went the opposite way to how it looked at the time.
Before the engine, business moved on camels and horses. Then the engine arrived. Did business go away? The camel traders lost their trade, and that was real. But the world's economy did not shrink. It grew by a factor nobody in 1800 could have imagined, because goods that could never travel started moving, and markets that could never reach each other connected, and there are more people making a living from trade today than were alive then.
In the 1980s a computer was a luxury. One machine cost more than a car, and only companies and wealthy families had one. The price fell. Did the computer industry shrink? Everybody on earth is carrying one now.
Same with cars. Same with air travel. Same with electricity.
An English economist wrote the sentence for it back in 1866, about coal. Make fuel cheaper to use, he said, and people do not burn less of it. They burn vastly more. He put it like this: it is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth. And on the same pages, the part almost nobody quotes: he said the very workers whose labor is saved often find their labor in greater demand afterward, not less.
Now apply it here. The cost of producing software just fell through the floor. So the world is not going to produce less software. It is going to produce far more of it than has ever existed, in places that could never afford custom software before.
All of it has to be checked.
Every cheap thing in history arrived with people insisting the trade around it was finished. So why were they wrong every single time?
Because they counted the work that was disappearing and not the work that was arriving. The camel trader was right that camels were finished, and wrong about trade. What is scarce now is not a job title, it is the ability to look at software a machine produced and say whether it is right. That capability is in short supply, the volume of code needing it goes up every month, and I watch our own students walk into those jobs. They need more of you, not less of you. The AI industry has even started renaming it. They call it evals, short for evaluation, which means testing. Does it work or not.