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Comment by majormajor

1 day ago

Established successful companies operate in a world where action and change often introduce more immediate risk than staying still. In those companies AI doesn't necessarily offer a lot of "increased productivity" gains because writing the code isn't the bottleneck. But many of them will try to chase cost savings by laying people off or slowing hiring.

There's a couple types of companies where the reverse is true: young companies trying to grow, and dying ones that need a turnaround.

Out of those two, young companies are less likely to be set in their ways. So the first place you really see the result of development moving faster with AI is probably going to be in future months and years when suddenly-big companies start getting widely known with products and business strategies that wouldn't have made sense a decade ago because writing code to try different things to even get the ball rolling was a bottleneck, and you could only do things that wouldn't scale for so long.

Or the productivity gains, albeit substantial, are not as earth shattering as the llm providers would have you believe. As with any new technology adoption is a laggard. The internet "existed" in the late 80's, early 90's. Many companies are still reaping productivity gains from plugging into this first.

  • I work in code generation, and often feel the fallacy of “because I can build something that looks 80% like your product in a day, you should pay me N millions.”

    It's roughly the same pitch that the ruby on rails crowd had 15 years ago, and the no code crowd 5 years ago.

    Very few companies need to rebuild their product every week, or actually care what tech stack it runs on. They are trying to build new things, or reduce how often those things break, or figuring out what if anything is worth building next.