Unique Research · Insight · November 20, 2023 · Adapted from Sequoia Capital perspective piece
Original: The Next Billion Developers (Sequoia Capital).
AGI is Silicon Valley’s hottest topic. Elon Musk and Sam Altman argue it is not only possible but inevitable. Others disagree: Yann LeCun has said “there is no such thing as AGI”; Anthropic’s Jack Clark called AGI “fervor” a “misguided religious impulse.”
As a focal point, AGI fires the imagination — free education and housing, poverty eased by UBI, human capital reallocated to science and the arts. Worthy goals. But what if AGI is a distraction? What if another path to a similar future needs no leap of technical faith — and is already underway?
There are more developers today than ever, and the population is starting to grow geometrically. Sequoia’s view: bringing one billion developers into the software economy could rival AGI in economic impact.
Software engineering is among the most powerful tools humans have invented. Make it far more widely available — assisted and accelerated by AI — and you can automate large parts of non-technical industries and create surplus value across the economy.
Is a billion developers realistic? Is teaching software engineering at that scale too hard? What would we do with all of them?
Why the developer population can keep compounding
This year the developer population crossed 100 million — more than 3× since GitHub first reported the metric in 2017. In its recent “Octoverse” report, GitHub said the global developer population grew 26% in the past year; GitHub added 21 million new accounts in 2022.
Three reasons to believe high growth continues:
1. Becoming a developer keeps getting easier. The virtuous cycle should continue. Over the past decade, cloud discarded servers; databases like MongoDB and Postgres simplified backends; Vercel and React changed the frontend. The best engineers keep improving the discipline itself. Better abstractions reduce complexity while raising leverage — so a 12-year-old in India can build a web app in days that once took professionals weeks.
2. Market forces keep pulling talent in. The best and brightest are over-indexing on coding. Far from diminishing as supply rises, economic returns to software engineering seem to be widening — productivity and skill applicability expanding faster than supply.
3. AI has been an unexpected accelerator. GitHub Copilot now writes 46% of code for its users. Zapier lets developers build automations from text descriptions. Open Interpreter turns the command line into a chat interface. With an AI partner, we may eventually program in natural language alone.
What a billion developers unlock
A larger developer population widens software’s reach. Companies like Stripe, Twilio, and Plaid already built primitives for payments, telecom, and banking. Incumbents in mature industries hire more engineers for internal digitization. Emerging startups apply software and AI to mining, robotics, construction, accounting, and law. A billion developers is about automating not only the digital economy but the physical one.
Unlike AGI, the promise of a billion developers is not eliminating work. It is using our resource — human capital — for ever greater impact. The coming decades’ story may be AI-augmented capability. Quieter still, the orderly advance of the developer revolution will continue.
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