ven as vibe coding allows users to produce massive quantities of code, that doesn’t mean everyone can be a software engineer without training.

Earlier this week, the viral 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis report from Citrini Research painted a bleak picture of the impacts of AI adoption at scale in which the economy and job markets crash as a result of AI-enabled productivity. This was a worst-case scenario thought experiment, but not everyone is buying into the doom and gloom.

In a rebuttal to Citrini’s post, Citadel Securities laid out the current state of the labor market in the face of burgeoning AI adoption. The findings point to the fact that the current unemployment rate is 4.28% and software engineering job postings are up 11% year over year.

In a post on X, Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, said of the data that while AI is allowing coding novices to do more, it’s also leading them to launch new custom software that eventually requires more expertise. "This is counterintuitive for some … but if you lower the cost of something that was previously supply-constrained, demand for that thing goes up. Software engineering is just one of the easiest examples to contemplate," Levie said.

This adds another layer to the conflicting narratives of AI’s impact on the job market, and particularly on the software engineering field. While some estimates point to AI making software engineers, among other jobs, entirely automated and therefore obsolete, other data shows that AI is increasing workloads, rather than shrinking them. One projection indicates that many of those laid off as a result of AI will be rehired to do similar work.

In short: While vibe coding is making it easier for tech novices to produce code, designs or proofs-of-concept, turning that code and those prototypes into something that’s actually useful requires a more deft hand, thereby creating more demand for technical expertise.

Our Deeper View

While this is good news for the software engineers worrying that their livelihood is on unsteady ground, it may also be another point in favor of the “SaaS-pocalypse” argument. Though executives of companies like Salesforce and Workday are downplaying the impact that AI will have on legacy software firms, AI is enabling enterprises to build their own custom tooling more easily than ever. That means they’re likely to shift their spending from legacy SaaS platforms to in-house developers and the AI tools that facilitate their rapid building.