There are lots of skills or tasks in the economy that will experience much more demand once the complexity or cost drops. Software is a perfect example, where we’re dramatically underutilizing code in the world because it’s always been too expensive or difficult to generate. We’re going to now jump straight to coding for way more than we ever would have before because it’s so much easier: designing software, testing it, generating internal apps, using it to prototype, trying multiple approaches to the same problem, and so on. Here’s a simple example of what it looks like. Because of AI agents handling most of the work, we now have sales engineers at Box building full custom prototypes for customers with the customer’s simulated environment with Box built into it. This is a task that previously would’ve been too time consuming to do for clients, so instead, they would just do a generic demo or presentation. But now with AI agents, this particular type of task is finally ROI positive (and feels much more achievable). We’re going to see this over and over again in software, but also almost every field of knowledge work as each category of rare skill becomes more accessible. Ironically, this will create far more jobs than people realize because of the new demand for people to do this type of work.
The reason “vibe coding” continues to grow and be successful is that the alternative to vibe coding is not “elite engineering”. It’s: the project wasn’t born, the idea didn’t get communicated, the app didn’t ship. Elite engineering is very scarce and will continue to be in