Comment by mbrumlow
11 hours ago
> They can get rid of 1/3-2/3s of their labor and make the same amount of money, why wouldn't they.
Because companies want to make MORE money.
Your hypothetical company is now competing with another company who didn’t opposite, and now they get to market faster, fix bugs faster, add feature faster, and responding to changes in the industry faster. Which results in them making more, while your employ less company is just status quo.
Also. With regards to oil, the consumption of oil increases as it became cheaper. With AI we now have a chance to do projects that simply would have cost way too much to do 10 years ago.
> Which results in them making more
Not necessarily.
You are assuming that the people can consume whatever is put in front of them. Markets get saturated fast. The "changes in the industry" mean nothing.
A) People are so used to infinite growth that it’s hard to imagine a market where that doesn’t exist. The industry can have enough developers and there’s a good chance we’re going to crash right the fuck into that pretty quickly. America’s industrial labor pool seemed like it provided an ever-expanding supply of jobs right up until it didn’t. Then, in the 80s, it started going backwards preeeetttty dramatically.
B) No amount of money will make people buy something that doesn’t add value to or enrich their lives. You still need ideas, for things in markets that have room for those ideas. This is where product design comes in. Despite what many developers think, there are many kinds of designers in this industry and most of them are not the software equivalent of interior decorators. Designing good products is hard, and image generators don’t make that easier.
Its really wild how much good UI stands out to me now that the internet is been flooded with generically produced slop. I created a bookmarks folder for beautiful sites that clearly weren't created by LLMs and required a ton of sweat to design the UI/UX.
I think we will transition to a world where handmade software/design will come at a huge premium (especially as the average person gets more distanced from the actual work required to do so, and the skills become rarer). Just like the wealthy pay for handmade shoes, as opposed to something off the shelf from footlocker, I think companies will revert back to hand crafted UX. These identical center column layout's with a 3x3 feature card grid at the bottom of your landing page are going to get really old fast in a sea of identical design patterns.
To be fair component libraries were already contributing to this degradation in design quality, but LLM s are making it much worse.
> With AI we now have a chance to do projects that simply would have cost way too much to do 10 years ago.
Not sure about that, at least if we're talking about software. Software is limited by complexity, not the ability to write code. Not sure LLMs manage complexity in software any better than humans do.