[delecti]

Realistically that's an increase of maybe a couple percent of cost per employee. If it truly does end up being a force multiplier, 2-5% more per dev is a bargain. I think it's exceedingly unlikely that LLMs will replace devs for most companies, but it probably will speed up dev work enough to justify at least a single-digit percent increase in per-dev cost.

[deadbabe]

“speeding up dev work” is pointless to a company. That benefit goes entirely to the developer and does not trickle down well.

You might think “ok, we’ll just push more workload onto the developers so they stay at higher utilization!”

Except most companies do not have endless amounts of new feature work. Eventually devs are mostly sitting idle.

So you think “Ha! Then we’ll fire more developers and get one guy to do everything!”

Another bad idea for several reason. For one, you are increasing the bus factor. Two, most work being done in companies at any given time is actually maintenance. One dev cannot maintain everything by themselves, even with the help of LLMs. More eyes on stuff means issues get resolved faster, and those eyes need to have real knowledge and experience behind them.

Speed is sexy but a poor trade off for quality code architecture and expert maintainers. Unless you are a company with a literal never ending list of new things to be implemented (very few), it is of no benefit.

Also don’t forget the outrage when Cursor went from $20/month to $200/month and companies quickly cancelled subscriptions…

[sobjornstad]

> Except most companies do not have endless amounts of new feature work. Eventually devs are mostly sitting idle.

At every place I have ever worked (as well as my personal life), the backlog was 10 times longer than anyone could ever hope to complete, and there were untold amounts of additional work that nobody even bothered adding to the backlog.

Some of that probably wouldn't materialize into real work if you could stay more on top of it – some of the things that eventually get dropped from the backlog were bad ideas or would time out of being useful before they got implemented even with higher velocity – but I think most companies could easily absorb a 300% increase or more in dev productivity and still be getting value out of it.

[deadbabe]

Where I work, if you literally implemented everything in the backlog as is you’d fuck everything up.

Things in a backlog are not independent units of work ready to go, there are nasty dependencies and unresolved questions that cross domains.