[m_ke]

This is only semi related but I wonder what will happen to these huge hierarchical orgs when the pace of software development improves by 10-20x thanks to LLMs.

How will these risk averse slow moving teams with a ton of process keep up with 100x more tiny teams of engineers who can ship whole features in days instead of months.

[postexitus]

You don't have to worry, it's not going to happen. LLMs does/will make individuals more efficient, therefore, reducing number of developers maybe, but you will still have the exact same bottlenecks at the exact same places throttling the delivery speed.

[m_ke]

I'm saying there will be 10-100x more small dev shops competing with the big cos. Pizza sized teams that own the whole product and can just ship stuff without the dog and pony show that's common at larger orgs.

[lotsoweiners]

Big co buys them. Big co sues them. Big co lobbies to keep them out of their space etc etc. Not everything is a technical challenge.

[postexitus]

These still exist and don't make a dent in the big cos balance sheets. They may be growing the pie though.

[hobs]

They'll build a billion middle of the road bland messes?

[m_ke]

No, some of them will build midjourney with no pressure to sell like instagram did

[skybrian]

When one bottleneck is removed, that usually means the rate of change is bottlenecked somewhere else. Maybe in the release process, or testing?

Or maybe the bottleneck is the willingness of customers to try new things? Risk-adverse customers will often avoid startups. Showing yourself to be trustworthy isn’t purely about the rate of feature development.

If the other bottlenecks can’t be removed easily, instead of 10x features you could end up with fewer software developers.

[m_ke]

Yes for sure, but from what I've seen at large companies the bottlenecks are already usually caused by intra team conflicts, legal hurdles and "processes" that take something that would have taken a dev with ownership 1-2 days to do and turns it into months long slogs and rituals.

Having worked at early stage startups and mid sized companies there's already a 10-20x productivity gap between them due to this (even on brand new projects at large companies vs startups, where it's not an issue of legacy code).

As an example I just witnessed a large co hire a consulting company to help them "ideate" on a RAG app that barely worked and required 3 rewrites and ~18 months to make it to POC stage, even though a front end dev had a better working POC that he hacked together in a day and a half.

I've heard way worse horror stories from friends at Google / Meta / Apple.

What will happen when tiny startups of 3-8 people get 5-20x more productive and can ship new stuff daily?

[gyomu]

> What will happen when tiny startups of 3-8 people get 5-20x more productive and can ship new stuff daily?

The answer is in the comment you just wrote.

If those tiny startups are successful, they will become the next bloated large companies where things take forever because of "intra team conflicts, legal hurdles and processes", which are categories of things LLMs will never solve because LLMs can't solve problems of human consensus.

If those startups aren't successful, they will run out of money and die.

Big companies take forever to do things because they have lots of paying customers to keep happy, a bunch of people who are ready to sue them at the slightest misstep, thousands of employees with families who want job stability and therefore don't want to be betting the farm every 6 months, etc.

Tiny companies can iterate really fast because they have none of this.

LLMs don't change anything about this fundamental reality.

[m_ke]

As the cost of going from 0 to 1 goes to 0 the incentives flip. You'll have way more small companies that raise little or no money from VCs and have no incentives to juice head count to pump the valuation.

I have a lot of friends who started similar companies recently, who are making millions in revenue with 2-8 people and deliberately plan to never grow head count past around 10 people.

We'll have way more teams like midjourney, early whatsapp / instagram and 37signals.

[gyomu]

Can you show us these companies?

[brookst]

Someone’s read The Goal!

100% agree. The SW pipeline is complicated. AI may one day slot into every part and improve velocity, but it will be piecemeal and better at some processes than others for a long while.