[sarchertech]

> If AI-coding is even marginally more economically efficient (i.e. more for less) the "old way" will be swept aside at breathtaking pace (as we're seeing).

On the scale I’ve been doing this (20 years), that hasn’t been the case.

Rails was massively more efficient for what 90% of companies where building. But it never had anywhere near a 90% market share.

It doesn’t take 1000 engineers to build CRUD apps, but companies are driven to grow by forces other than pure market efficiency.

There are still plenty of people using simple text editors when full IDEs have offered measurable productivity boosts for decades.

>(as we’re seeing)

I work at a big tech company. Productivity per person hasn’t noticeably increased. The speed that we ship hasn’t noticeably increased. All that’s happening is an economic downturn.

[throw10920]

I think that you're correct in that Rails and IDEs offer significant productivity benefits but aren't/weren't widely adopted.

But AI seems to be different in that it claims to replace programmers, instead of augment them. Yes, higher productivity means you don't have to hire as many people, but with AI tools there's specifically the promise that you can get rid of a bunch of your developers, and regardless of truth, clueless execs buy the marketing.

Stupid MBAs at big companies see this as a cost reduction - so regardless of the utility of AI code-generation tools (which may be high!), or of the fact that there are many other ways to get productivity benefits, they'll still try to deploy these systems everywhere.

That's my projection, at least. I'd love to be wrong.

[sarchertech]

I believe you’re 100% right about trying to replace devs. In that respect it’s like offshoring.

But no matter how hard cost cutters wanted to, they were never able to actually reduce the total number of devs outside of major economic downturns.