Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by realusername 846 days ago
> Even ignoring my comments, its quite easy to see how AI can multiply an individual engineer, that is naturally going to be applied at scale by investors.

Yeah sure I'm getting a ~10% productivity boost personally from those tools but it's not like you can give those to non-devs and expect them to replace a developer with it.

Let's not forget that we have code generators usable by non developers since the 90s. It's not like it's a particularly new addition.
1 comments
infecto 846 days ago
> Yeah sure I'm getting a ~10% productivity boost personally from those tools but it's not like you can give those to non-devs and expect them to replace a developer with it.

> Let's not forget that we have code generators usable by non developers since the 90s. It's not like it's a particularly new addition.

I never said anything about non-developers. If you hire 10 developers and on average the AI assistants give a 10% productivity boost, that potentially means you don't have to hire the 11th developer. I am not suggesting that engineers are gone, only that headcount reduction via AI tooling is already happening.

link
realusername 846 days ago
The modern developer tooling already had a much larger impact on productivity than AI probably will and the only thing it did is increase even more the number of developers.

If I was the CEO of a company making headcount reduction with AI, I would be more worried about my company itself than the job of the ones I'm firing.

link
infecto 846 days ago
It is not even worth comparing. The industry as a whole is seeing productivity gains by using AI Assistants. I am not here to speculate the medium-term, just the immediate term which is companies are see it as a multipler where they might not need to hire that 11th developer.
link
realusername 846 days ago
I'm speculating on the medium term especially because I don't see much of an impact on the short term. While that logic sounds okay, I'm not seeing it right now, the productivity gains seems to be used to produce even more stuff.

I've never been in a company where the roadmap isn't full to the brim, there doesn't seem to be a limiting factor on this side.

link
infecto 846 days ago
I generally agree but I think its a different story now that we are no longer in 0% interest rate territory. Road maps are probably still full but money is no longer free.
link