[Sayrus]

> even as little as 50%

Depending on how you measure that velocity (e.g. including security risks, debugging capabilities, ...) even as little as 5% increase is a no brainer for a business. Whether it's AI, powerful laptops, a fully-fledged IDE, an environment with a good dev experience, anything that gives a few percent increase snowballs into millions over an entire workforce.

Whether the current AI capabilities provide that increase without trade-offs that would be too heavy later one is a question that still seems up to debate.

[3np]

Meanwhile, my last big employer "couldn't motivate the expense" of a hardware upgrade for the most productive dev on the team (who spends a large part of their time waiting for CI jobs and builds) of <1/4 of their monthly pay. That should be a no-brainer and paid off itself quickly.

I do not believe that corps make rational decisions around these matters.

[rocqua]

I would wager 80% of places that write software have almost trivial ways to get that 5% improvement. Between ci/cd, static checkers, upgrading IDEs, and just aligning practices between everyone, I think you can easily improve at 50% of places.

Those things don't happen because the slowdown required before adoption, and the office politics of convincing everyone to make a change, and then the effort of convincing people that this new thing is what should be changed to.

[constantcrying]

>I would wager 80% of places that write software have almost trivial ways to get that 5% improvement.

No. Because most of these changes are totally opaque, you don't know what change needs to be made and making it becomes a political problem in the organization. Giving each engineer a subscription to some service is trivial.