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Comment by guluarte | Hacker News Reader

AI is making developers more productive, although I doubt that will cause a shortage in jobs

AI has enabled my team to essentially all become polyglots. It's really amazing to be able to jump between languages, using the best tools for the domain.

* JS/TS - FE

* Ruby on Rails - Most of our business logic

* Python - Doc and LLM specific code

* Misc. other languages - niche features that make the most sense in specific languages.

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Previously, we'd spend a lot of time on dumb little things. Things that you probably take for granted in your primary language, but can become super frustrating in a new language.

Agree, I can easily see a team of a dozen developers shrunk down by half and still maintain the same quantity and quality of output.

It’s wild how people never seem to say “wow, now our team of 12 can be twice as productive. Think about how much less stressed they’ll be and more productive we’ll be able to be for the company!”.

Because if you start making more widgets then now your support, marketing, sales acquisition et al costs also have to scale. But that needs foresight... And until the AI workforce comes for those too, it's easier to claim short term victory.

Great answer that addresses the business incentives. Scaling is hard (perhaps impossible in some markets) and possibly expensive, while cutting labor costs has an immediate benefit to the bottom line.

In my experience, the return rate for improved productivity is usually targeted at around 99% to the company, 1% to employees.

That’s what ends up happening in practice. Who has actually been fired because of AI? GitHub Copilot has been out forever

Then why not make a solid argument for it higher up in the chain?

Instead of a reaction to a comment further down.

any example use case for ruby on rails?

I still can't think the use case of using ai to help me code my ruby on rails project

> AI is making developers more productive, although I doubt that will cause a shortage in jobs

It appears to have already led to layoffs and hiring cutbacks.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/04/tech/ai-tech-layoffs/index.ht...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/ibm-pause-hiring-plans-re...

Could. Also might not, depends on a lot of things. But I have to say, there are a still plenty of horse and buggy drivers today, weavers, typewriter manufacturers. I'm sure they'll still be many programmers with AI advances.

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