More with less

More with less, or is it more with the same (via source)

How automatable the work already is. Where the work is rules based, high volume, and low variation, AI may replace labour in the same way classic automation has. Think claims processing, simple customer support, structured back office workflows. These functions already lived close to the automation frontier. AI just expands the frontier a bit. This will reduce headcount, but mostly in places where headcount has been under pressure for decades anyway.

The cost and consequences of mistakes. In many industries, the limiting factor is not productivity, but risk. Healthcare, aviation, finance, law. Increased throughput also increases the risk surface area. If AI increases the probability or cost of an error, you cannot shrink the team. You often need more human oversight, not less.

This is a very hot take that rings true for some problem spaces. The bottleneck has never been the amount of code being created or the headcount of developers working on a given problem. Instead validation and alignment hold a much bigger role. Assuming they will always trend toward the minimum viable to get a job done, you might see gains with AI negligible even when code generation is up considerably. Capturing EV as the cost of errors * probability might be the primary metric to watch for.