Comment by marcosdumay

Note that OP didn’t say anything about “close to no developers”, only that they could tell they had become more productive.

I too know I am being more productive. The most concrete examples for my work has come from the ease of prototyping: making a quick quasi-working version of an idea is now insanely easy, so we’ve been able to explore (and adopt) ideas that would not have been worth the effort previously.

Can't reveal for confidentiality reasons but I know several examples, and have worked and been working on a couple, too.

But my claim isn't that there's no developer involved, it's two-fold:

1. LLMs do allow for features which were not possible before, or which would require significantly much more engineering, if possible at all. For example: producing a sensible analysis of a piece of poetry (or thousands of pieces of poetry) in seconds.

2. LLMs, if used correctly (not just "stick a prompt in it and pray") allow for very fast time-to-market, building quick solutions out of which you can then carve out the bits that you know you can (and should) turn into proper code.

Point 2. should not be understated. A smaller team (of developers!) can now get to market very quickly, as well as iterate to appropriate product-market-fit fast, offloading logic to LLMs and agentic loops, while slowly and selectively coding in the features. So, slowly, we replace the LLM/agents with code.

Not only have I worked on and seen products which fit point 1. (so very hard to do without LLM's abilities), but I have seen a lot of 2.

Furthermore, I've seen a sentiment on HN (and with peers) which I find is incredibly true: LLMs and agents allows us to offload the parts we would never work on due to not enjoying them in the first place. They effectively let us to "take the plunge" or "finally pull the trigger" on a project which we would have otherwise just never been able to start. We are able to try new things more often, and take more risk. As a personal example, I hate frontend development, something which always prevented me from starting a bunch of projects. Now I've been able to start a bunch of these projects. It has definitely unlocked me, allowing me to test more ideas, build projects that people actually use (the frontend only has to be "good enough" — but it has to exist), or eventually bring in more people to that project.

So LLMs have undoubtedly dramatically changed at least my life as an engineer, developer, and product guy. I can't say it has changed the industry for sure, but if I had to bet, I'd say "hell yes".

(LLMs have definitely had a very profound impact on many other aspects of my life as well, outside of work)

> Does anybody have any example of a company that made some huge product from close to no developers by using those AIs?

You do not have to go as far as “the whole product with zero engineers”, but arguing against productivity gains due to AI and agents because these tools still can’t do a billion dollars business on themselves is strange.

My brother is doing this right now, FWIW. He still works with at least one other developer but has been vibe coding two products simultaneously. I've seen them, they work great and will be genuinely useful when launched. One of them already has commercial interest from the intended users. He's launched a successful consumer app before pre-LLM, so has form.

Of course you could say that's not "huge", but it's clearly working and is allowing him to move at insane speed.

If you created that, or any amazing achievement, how quick would you be to share that it was the AI and not "natty"?

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