Comment by 0xbadcafebee

That's not the million dollar question; anyone who's done any kind of AI coding will tell you it's ridiculously faster. I haven't touched JavaScript, CSS & HTML in like a decade. But I got a whole website created with complex UI interactions in 20 minutes - and no frameworks - by just asking ChatGPT to write stuff for me. And that's the crappy, inefficient way of doing this work. Would have taken me a week to figure out all that. If I'd known how to do it already, and I was very good, perhaps it would have taken the same amount of time? But clearly there is a force-multiplier at work here.

The million dollar question is, what are the unintended, unpredicted consequences of developing this way?

If AI allows me to write code 10x faster, I might end up with 10x more code. Has our ability to review it gotten equally fast? Will the number of bugs multiply? Will there be new classes of bugs? Will we now hire 1 person where we hired 5 before? If that happens, will the 1 person leaving the company become a disaster? How will hiring work (cuz we have such a stellar track record at that...)? Will the changing economics of creating software now make SaaS no longer viable? Or will it make traditional commercial software companies no longer viable? Will the entire global economy change, the way it did with the rise of the first tech industry? Are we seeing a rebirth?

We won't know for sure what the consequences are for a while. But there will be consequences.