Comment by netcan
6 hours ago
It's just hard to tell the difference between "real" demand and "circular." That's the concern.
PG had an essay about this during the dotcom, when he worked at yahoo. Iirc...Yahoo's share price and other big successes in the space attracted investment into startups. Startups used that money to advertise on yahoo. Yahoo bought some of these the startups.
So... a lot of the revenue used to analyze companies for investment was actually a 2nd order side effect of these investments.
Here the risk is that we have Ai investments servicing Ai investments for other Ai investments.
Google buys Nvidia chips to sell anthropic compute. Anthropic sells coding assist to Ai companies (including Google and Nvidia). They buy anthropic services with investor money that is flowing because of all this hype.
Imo the general risk factor is trying to get ahead of actual worldly use.
The Ai optimists have a sense that Ai produces things that are valuable (like software) at massive scale...that is output.
But... even if true, it will take a lot of time, and lot of software for the Econony to discover this, go through the path dependencies and actually produce value.
The most valuable, known software has already afy been written. The stuff that you could do, but haven't yet is stuff that hasn't made the cut. Value isn't linear.
I'm starting to transition how we build software at our company due to the power of AI. No more: five code monkey contractors under a lead. Two top-notch devs are all that is needed now, unrestrained by sprints and mindless ceremonies. There is going to be a giant sucking sound in India.
I can't continue the current model. The dev that gets AI is done in five hours, the ones that don't are thrashing for the next two weeks. I have to unleash the good AI dev. I have the Product team handing us markdown files now with an overview of the project and all the details and stories built into them. I'm literally transforming how a billion dollar company works right now because of this. I have Codex, Claude and GitHub Copilot enterprise accounts on top of Office 365. Everyone is being trained right now as most devs are behind, even.
> No more: five code monkey contractors under a lead. Two top-notch devs are all that is needed now, unrestrained by sprints and mindless ceremonies.
This doesn't tell me anything. Two devs who cared and didn't have a bunch of pointless meetings could already, and regularly did, scoop the big tech teams.
There were always 2 ways to complete a ticket. One that did what the stakeholder wanted, and one that does what the ticket says.
But devs that care about the product and what the stakeholders need are rare, and finding one of them was already a significant bottleneck on most projects.
AI might be an accelerator, but we've yet to see if it's optimizing the part that was actually the bottleneck yet.
Ok... but extrapolating from this to "whole market" paradigms is speculative.
The (imo) question isn't how you produce software, but what the value of this software is. Are you going to make make/better software such that customers pay more, or buy more? Are those customers getting value of this kind?
The answer may be yes. But... it's not an automatic yes.
Instead of programming think of accounting. Say you experience what you are experiencing, but as an accountant. 6 person team replaced by 2-3 hotshots.
So... Maybe you can sell more/better accounting for a higher price. But... potential is probably pretty limited. Over time, maybe business practices will adjust and find uses for this newly abundant capacity.
Maybe you lower prices. Maybe the two hotshot earn as much as the previous team.
If you are reducing team size, and that's the primary benefit... the fired employees need to find useful emplyment elsewhere in the economy for surplus value to be realized.
Mediating all this is the law of diminishing returns. At any given moment, new marginal resources have less productive value than the current allocation.
And the day you don't have that drug what do you do? If anything you are training people to become dependent on one or more subscription services.
Solidworks is also a subscription service.
Like the drug of electricity and Internet, running water grocery stores?
Except the dev that gets AI done in 5 hours will have a poorer mental model of the code. Whether that's important might or might not depend on whether that bites you in the ass at some point.
Don’t really agree with this.
That dev is productive with AI precisely _because_ they have a good mental model.
AI like other tools is a multiplier - it doesn’t make bad devs good, but it makes good devs significantly more productive.
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But does it matter?
If you write a program in Python or JavaScript, you have a terrible mental model for how that code is actually executed in machine code. It's irrelevant though, you figure it out only when it's a problem.
Even if you don't have a great mental model, now you have AI to identify the problems and generate an explanation of the structure for you.
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