GenAI will indeed drop the cost of software creation and therefore increase demand for more software.
Things that formerly were prohibitively expensive are now cheap enough to be doable. Which increases the market for software engineers that can get things done with the help of AI and other tools. These won't be the type of software engineers that specialize in things that should be automated but the type of engineers that can build a lot of stuff that formerly would have required them to delegate a lot of work to other engineers.
This is how the software developer community has historically grown actually. It used to be that software engineers were faffing about with punch cards, assembly code, etc. Working months to produce a few kb worth of software. No libraries or anything. It all ran on bare metal. These days what engineers build is the tip of the iceberg because it all runs on frameworks, libraries, operating systems, etc. that do all of the heavy lifting. Which makes them way more productive than their colleagues from half a century ago.
Things that formerly were prohibitively expensive are now cheap enough to be doable. Which increases the market for software engineers that can get things done with the help of AI and other tools. These won't be the type of software engineers that specialize in things that should be automated but the type of engineers that can build a lot of stuff that formerly would have required them to delegate a lot of work to other engineers.
This is how the software developer community has historically grown actually. It used to be that software engineers were faffing about with punch cards, assembly code, etc. Working months to produce a few kb worth of software. No libraries or anything. It all ran on bare metal. These days what engineers build is the tip of the iceberg because it all runs on frameworks, libraries, operating systems, etc. that do all of the heavy lifting. Which makes them way more productive than their colleagues from half a century ago.