[gghffguhvc]

As a co-founder and dev at a bootstrapped company I’d say AI has and will slow developer hiring rate. We’re just more productive and on top of things more.

We’ve also reduced the hours we work per week. We care about getting things done not time behind a screen.

[notyourwork]

Sure AI can build cute POCs. Will it build scaled solutions, not this year. The amount of ignorance in this post is precisely why the industry is so rattled. Gen AI tools are great, they are not making people orders of magnitude more productive.

[yumraj]

> Will it build scaled solutions, not this year.

That is not true IMHO.

If one is expecting Lovable to create a production app by just giving a few prompts, that obviously is not going to happen, not now and most probably for a long time.

However, if you use Claude Code or one of the proper IDEs, you can definitely guide it step by step and build production quality code, actually code that may even be better than most software engineers out there.

Moreover, these tools allow you to take your proficiency in software dev and specific languages/frameworks to other languages/frameworks without being an expert in them, and that I think is a huge win in itself.

[notyourwork]

I work in big tech as a senior engineer. I’m aware of what’s out there and none of it is solving problems in a way that’s replacing swathes of engineers anytime soon.

It may be an excuse to layoff but it’s not ramping up velocity in ways that PR is making it seem to non tech literate.

[yumraj]

I never said anything about swathes of engineers, merely that it is possible to build production quality stuff.

From my experience, these are better suited at the moment for small teams and new projects. It’s unclear to me how they’ll work in large team/massive legacy code situations. Teams will have to experiment and come up with processes that work. IMHO anyway.

[gghffguhvc]

We’ve been in business 15 years. These aren’t POCs. Even at say 20% productivity boost I feel way ahead to give devs 9 day fortnights and soon hopefully 4 day weeks.

[itsnowandnever]

how is it both a bootstrapped company slow to hiring devs (due to AI) and also a company that's been in business 15 years? if you were going to hire devs to scale out, you would've done it 10 years ago?

[gghffguhvc]

Slowed the rate of hiring devs.

Normally as we add enterprise customers we have to dedicate more dev resource keeping them happy. But since Claude code and now codex we have not felt that feeling of not being on top of the work. Thus not feeling the need to hire more devs.