[solumunus]

It really is night and day. Most of them feel like cool toys, Claude Code is a genuine work horse. It immediately became completely integral to my workflow. I own a small business and I can say with absolute confidence this will reduce the amount of devs I need to hire going forward.

[hollowturtle]

I don't get claims like that, if AI let me do more and be more productive with less people I could also grow and scale more, that means that I can also hire more and again multiply growth because each dev will bring more and more... I'm skeptic because I don't see it happening, actually the contrary more people doing more things maybe, but the not 10x nor 100x otherwise we would see products built in 5 years coming out in literally 15 days

[davnicwil]

It might be that the value more software can add is already at its limit in any given business - or at least returns will be diminishing. Meaning in those particular businesses the appetite to hire devs might stay flat (or even shrink!) as AI makes existing devs more efficient.

The more interesting question is whether this is true across the economy as a whole. In my view the answer is clearly no. Are we already operating at the limit of more software to add value at the margin? No.

So though any particular existing business might stop hiring or even cut staff, it won't matter if more businesses are created to do yet more things in the world with software. We might even end up in a place where across the economy, more dev jobs exist as a result of more people doing more with software in a kind of snowball effect.

More conservatively, though, you'd at least expect us to just reach equilibrium with current jobs if indeed there is new demand for software to soak up.

[solumunus]

It’s not my goal to scale infinitely. I want to run a small, tight business which is highly profitable but also pleasant to operate long term. I’m not looking for some huge exit.