> we have all this work that needs to be done and not enough people to get the work done

I believe the reasoning is roughly to ask, what was occupying the developer hours? Was the majority of it typing out lines of code or was it reasoning about higher level concerns?

It usually comes up in response to predictions that the role of developer will be completely replaced in the near future. It's possible to observe significant efficiency gains without obviating the need for everything the role was doing.

Of course such reasoning has little to do with projections of future developer employment numbers. Will the switch from push mowers to gas mowers reduce the demand for people who get paid to mow lawns by increasing their efficiency? Will it increase the total lawn acreage across the market? It could well do both. However, if it makes having a lawn affordable for the average joe it could counterintuitively increase demand for the job.

Of course the stated goal of the AI companies is to develop the analog of fully robotic lawnmowers. But despite how impressive recent advancements have been we still have yet to see any evidence of novel abstract reasoning or a theory that would be expected to lead to it.

In other words, people have been speculating about the development of fully autonomous lawnmowers and the risk that they unilaterally decide to cut us all down for the past 50 years. "I, lawnmower" was a smash hit a few years ago. Now gas ones have appeared and continue to make rapid advancements but still no convincing signs of autonomy.