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Comment by flappyeagle | Hacker News Reader

If you make your high-cost employees much more productive with AI, you may not need to reduce per-headcount cost so much anymore. The cultural and language benefits start to dominate the calculation.

That said, India will only grow in importance, so I wouldn't be surprised if the team was reinstated in a few years

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This, AI more directly competes with service outsourcing than anything else.

AI isn't reliable. But is your outsourced team any better?

Outsourcing is cheap, but AI is 100 times cheaper.

Communicating with AI, via prompt engineering, is easier than setting up cross-cultural + timezone communications.

India really depends on service outsourcing. So I'm curious regarding how it'll be impacted by AI. That being said, nothing stopping the Indians themselves using the AIs and reinventing their companies.

That may be the market insight of the week. So the next question: how much cheaper?

> make your high-cost employees much more productive with AI

Might happen soon, might not. AI has so far proven astounding for problems to which solutions are robust to small perturbations -- natural language, visual art -- but code is different.

Disagree. The overwhelming amount of software being written is almost entirely plagiarizable from stack overflow or GitHub. It will need to be slightly reworked, but that’s it. The real trick is figuring out how to ask your copilot for the bite-sized pieces one at a time.

> The real trick is figuring out how to ask your copilot for the bite-sized pieces one at a time.

We agree on that. Breaking the problem into bite sized pieces is the really hard problem. I can't explain my codebase to the AI. I have to figure out what to change myself. If I can offload syntactical stuff to an AI, great, that'll save me 10% of my time. Nothing to sneeze at, but nothing that will make my job disappear either.

india has a thriving tech start up scene so they are much better off serving local entrepreneurs

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