[marcosdumay]

Weird baseless push for AI on the end, with no reasoning, no goal, no claim of gain. "Just go and use AI, people, developers must adopt new things."

It's not the first article I've read recently that is an ad for AI after a short context pretending to criticize it, with nothing connecting them.

[jimbokun]

Oh come on, the value of AI > 0. That’s not a controversial take.

[skydhash]

Maybe. The value of leaning Linux and basic shell tools is > 0 but a lot of devs do fine without.

My take is that “$EDITOR fluency” >> AI.

[bitwize]

AI is the new cloud. There's no market for people or companies who aren't committed to it. If you're a dev who refuses to use AI, no company will hire you; and should a company decide not to use AI they will have a hard time retaining devs (and they will need more devs). Their investors and big-ticket customers will also think twice before signing off on major commitments.

So yes, use AI. Don't nitpick the costs and benefits. The world is headed this way; if you want to develop software for a living and afford to eat, you need to be too.

[dakiol]

> and should a company decide not to use AI they will have a hard time retaining devs (and they will need more devs)

Need more devs? Why? If a company was being profitable just fine prio AI era, they will still be profitable if they decide not to use AI. Shipping crap faster is not a formula for success. Shipping quality faster? I prefer shipping quality at a good pace

[vanuatu]

youll be outcompeted by companies that do use it (caveat: effectively)

growth is much more important than profitability

[californical]

Will you though? I see this repeated, but I’ve almost never changed products because one has 10x more features than another.

I usually buy and use products that are simple and effective, and that get out of my way to do the thing that I want to do.

For email, I’m a happy customer of Fastmail and I’ve been paying them for years. I don’t care if they ever release a new feature and I’d never switch away from them to a competitor that’s less stable but does more. They release improvements slowly but they are very stable. But I would switch away from them if they start shoving AI into things or delivering subpar features that make my email worse.

For healthcare related websites, I can already see my test results, schedule appointments, and communicate with my doctor. What more could an AI-driven medical platform give me that makes my life better?

For maps — I unfortunately had to move away from Apple recently when they added Ads. So I’m mostly just using OpenStreetMaps. I could see AI improving the OSM functionality by updating the app (OrganicMaps) routing algorithms and such, so there is room for growth there, but it’s not that massive.

Can anyone offer features that Uber can’t now due to LLMs? There are a bunch of local Uber competitors but uber wins because it’s easy and there aren’t major features to differentiate there.

Do you have examples that prove that delivering a bunch of features really fast is going to steal customers from something?

[jimbokun]

Well this is a different argument, that we really don’t need very much new software because so much of what was needed is already written.

I’m sympathetic to this argument. But it’s orthogonal to the AI question.

[vanuatu]

your personal experience is clearly in the techie bubble

ai is more than delivering features fast (thats probably one of the lowest priorities for companies)

right now its a race to automate work, especially back office. companies already are seeing 10M+ in savings and revenue growth and we're barely starting. workflows in sales, outbound, gtm, marketing, eng, operations, compliance, kyc etc

consumer is a different beast, consumers want convenience which has already been hyperoptimized and the big consumer cos run on network effs instead of features

[fzeroracer]

> right now its a race to automate work, especially back office. companies already are seeing 10M+ in savings and revenue growth

What? Where? Citations please. We're seeing big companies massively stall in all traditional sectors except AI which is a irrational market built off hype.

[bitwize]

Enjoy getting your milkshake drunk by AI-first companies then.

[dmurray]

It's much more than that. There's plenty of market for people and companies who don't specialise in cloud software. The market for programmers who don't use AI is going to be more like the market for programmers who don't use compilers.

[slopinthebag]

Or, don’t. Do what you want, don’t listen to random people on the internet telling you what to do.

[fzeroracer]

> So yes, use AI. Don't nitpick the costs and benefits. The world is headed this way; if you want to develop software for a living and afford to eat, you need to be too.

It's really saddening to see software engineers throw out all critical thinking and innovation out the window to behave like sheep and follow the trend line. The industry was trailblazed by people that refused to do just that and the same is going to be true in the future.

[jimbokun]

Are you saying productivity is strictly greater for developers who don’t use AI?