Comment by nkrisc
3 hours ago
Considering that’s a healthy portion of a salary for an additional employee per person, the fact they’re slashing spending sure makes it look like AI wasn’t even a 2x multiplier at minimum.
3 hours ago
Considering that’s a healthy portion of a salary for an additional employee per person, the fact they’re slashing spending sure makes it look like AI wasn’t even a 2x multiplier at minimum.
You could only conclude that if they would have dropped LLMs completely. It just means they see the benefit/cost optimum at a lower point than 100k/programmer.
I also doubt a longterm 2x multiplier for most developers.
Even if it was a net negative, you still might want to titrate the exit a bit just to prevent the total chaos of broken workflows. Can't really draw the conclusions you want to draw.
I don't think you need the LLMs to be completely dropped to indicate this. Even entry-level faang programmer salaries are in the 300k range, so the fact that LLMs aren't worth 100k/programmer does tell us something about the marginal usefulness. If the drop was motivated was motivated purely by price-per-output, it would indicate the LLMs are less useful than adding another 1/3 engineer. However, as discussed in other comments, there are other motivations as well, notably dogfooding homegrown tooling.
We're sitting on a year of more or less capable coding models and I have not exactly seen a revolution in new software being released. AI is likely a force multiplier for specific subsets of individuals and workflows. Coding is not a bottleneck for a lot of systems.
I suspect that SaaS is silently being eaten alive as an industry.
I think SaaS will be fine. How the field works might change, but in the end marginal cost of software is still zero and when you've got a quality, well-tested and well-designed product it's going to be obviously better than things vibed together.
You often pay for regulatory compliance and liability with SaaS. Would you risk running your own vibe-coded payroll or accounting system for your company?
Yep. The SaaS-is-doomed crowd are missing this part. It's the Red Hat model (debatable how well they do it, but they exist, so..)
Talk to the emulator community. Huge leaps being made there. Or binary decompiling topics. Huge leaps there. There is more than web applications
Can you link to some of the huge leaps in emulators and binary decompilation that have caught your attention?
That's monthly, not yearly.
Oops, yikes.
Very likely a negative multiplier.