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Comment by calmoo | Hacker News Reader

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Investors are not making waves with PR announcements but this is where a lot of the PE/VC space is talking and heading. How can we unlock more productivity with fewer heads by using AI. Its quite similar to the Klarna story, reduce headcount and increase productivity. Even ignoring my comments, its quite easy to see how AI can multiply an individual engineer, that is naturally going to be applied at scale by investors.

I think this is a naive way to looking at things.

I like Sam Altman's quote on this. "I think the world is gonna find out that if you can have 10 times as much code at the same price, you can just use even more. So write even more code."

I agree that it will have an impact, but I'm wary to predict something specific, whether negative or positive.

This. Current tech of AI is comparable to github and npm where when they got introduced (but less dramatic in terms of productivity improvement actually), what do you think happened when we got millions of open source libraries to do our job much more effectively? The number of developers did not shrink as a result, instead it skyrocketed!

I guess my point is I am not predicting anything. This has already been happening in the past year. Smaller companies are seeing a crunch; have we not continued to see layoffs at the big tech companies? The name of the game is reducing costs and headcount at the moment. There are certainly outliers, like OpenAI, that have massive demand but for the vast majority of companies this is not true.

It'd be nice to see the actual numbers at Meta, Google, Microsoft etc. My own work hasn't been multiplied by more than 1.01.

I don't think we need to see numbers from FAANG to see that as an industry in while, AI assistants/AI auto complete can save time. I am probably just not as smart as a distinguised engineer like yourself but I find time savings using these tools.

My workflow doesn't get a huge improvement from the current AI assistants. That could mean I'm out of a job soon. If it works for you that's great.

I'm just curious to see numbers from places that I assume somewhat meaningfully measure productivity across a range of "engineering" roles

Fair. I don't think anyone in a position of experience is out of a job. I do think this impacts future hiring decisions.

Maybe this is a me problem, but if I could figure out a way to use AI to significantly accelerate or replace developers or my own work, I would do it.

I have experimented a bunch with llm, copilot, etc. The current offering is useful in a limited scope. People google a bit less, and they are a bit better than existing IDE snippeting tools. I see potential but what is on the market doesn't give me a 10% improvement.

If you ask an LLM to write you a story it will write you a story. If it want a very specific story you have to write a very detailed prompt. Code generation is also like this. A seasoned developer can write code as fast as they can write a detailed prompt, and a newbie may be able to work faster in unfamiliar technologies but is susceptible to following bad suggestions (e.g. llm will tell you to write your own email validation instead of using the teams preferred library).

The vibe I get is like low code technologies. Initially they look promising and you wonder if you need skilled people anymore but any non trivial problem and you're just coding on diagram form realising text is better.

What are you / that using? I'd really like to try it if it is publicly available.

What I see anecdotally is, now debt costs money a lot of buisness cases for tech investment just don't make sense. Borrowing to buy future growth made a lot of sense when interest rates were negative. Now we have a lot of pressure to deliver profits today.

I use Copilot within the IDE extensively and only for the autocomplete. It is not always correct but it honestly is correct enough of the time that it is like having a second brain complete what I was thinking. If I want to write a unit test for the function I can do it at lightspeed compared to the past.

I will use a flavor of a chat interface (Mistral Chat, ChatGPT, Gemini) when I am trying to figure out something I don't have domain expertise on. For example I have a lot of trouble digesting AWS docs, I often get permissioning wrong or a configuration that is not well outlined to me. I use a chat interface to walk through the problem and more times than not get to a solution a lot quicker than if I had tried to step through all the docs.

I am still doing most of the thinking, I don't find LLMs to be that amazing for engineering solutions. I think it will happen in the future though as they become perhaps more opinionated, especially on software engineering.

> developer can write code as fast as they can write a detailed prompt

That is misleading. Usually what happens for me is I write a line of code, then I wait few seconds and copilot will write the next 5-10 lines. I have in my head what I expect it to write, so I can immediately tell if it is good. It is much less mentally draining as well, it is easy for me to code 12h a day and with higher productivity rates than before. I have done so many side and interesting hobby projects because of that productivity boost.

But overall it hasn't made me code less, it has made me spend more time coding because it is much faster to get the same value.

Same might be for the companies. Projects that weren't worth to do before will now be, because they are cheaper and faster to do.

> Even ignoring my comments, its quite easy to see how AI can multiply an individual engineer, that is naturally going to be applied at scale by investors.

Yeah sure I'm getting a ~10% productivity boost personally from those tools but it's not like you can give those to non-devs and expect them to replace a developer with it.

Let's not forget that we have code generators usable by non developers since the 90s. It's not like it's a particularly new addition.

> Yeah sure I'm getting a ~10% productivity boost personally from those tools but it's not like you can give those to non-devs and expect them to replace a developer with it.

> Let's not forget that we have code generators usable by non developers since the 90s. It's not like it's a particularly new addition.

I never said anything about non-developers. If you hire 10 developers and on average the AI assistants give a 10% productivity boost, that potentially means you don't have to hire the 11th developer. I am not suggesting that engineers are gone, only that headcount reduction via AI tooling is already happening.

The modern developer tooling already had a much larger impact on productivity than AI probably will and the only thing it did is increase even more the number of developers.

If I was the CEO of a company making headcount reduction with AI, I would be more worried about my company itself than the job of the ones I'm firing.

It is not even worth comparing. The industry as a whole is seeing productivity gains by using AI Assistants. I am not here to speculate the medium-term, just the immediate term which is companies are see it as a multipler where they might not need to hire that 11th developer.

I'm speculating on the medium term especially because I don't see much of an impact on the short term. While that logic sounds okay, I'm not seeing it right now, the productivity gains seems to be used to produce even more stuff.

I've never been in a company where the roadmap isn't full to the brim, there doesn't seem to be a limiting factor on this side.

I generally agree but I think its a different story now that we are no longer in 0% interest rate territory. Road maps are probably still full but money is no longer free.

Yes this is the mind of an economist. The question is how much new production/creative work can be made with AI or if it's just replacing common QA tasks.

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