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Comment by onlypassingthru | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure your example tracks. With an excavator, one person can outperform a 100 person digging crew. AI is the next excavator.

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If 1 person can use an excavator/AI, then a 100 person crew can use 100 excavators/AIs. Capabilities have increased for everyone, not just for 1 man operations.

Have you seen how big excavators are physically? There are functional limits to certain tools. I can see how software could become a hot mess if AI tools aren’t calibrated or the human element makes a mess of combining disparate parts.

It's a metaphor.

In this scenario, it's like the excavators are pocket sized, and cheap. As cheap as the shovel. So there is no reason for the entire digging crew not to have one each

In this analogy, how many ditches do you think need to be dug? Each company only has a limited number of ditches they need done. The unnecessary human diggers will be let go.

I didn't make the original analogy. I was just explaining part of the point.

I disagree with the number 100. It is not a reasonable number with respect to current AI capabilities.

If the cost of digging ditches goes down, companies will be apt to dig more ditches. I've seen many projects worth $100k-$500k but they weren't pursued because the cost in salaries was higher.

I don't think companies are generally well run to let go of unnecessary people efficiently. At least one place I've worked at had, by my estimates, $100m salary of unnecessary people employed. It didn't matter, the business has revenues of $100b yearly, so it's a drop in the bucket.

In my experience, team efficiency does not improve linearly with head count. A 100-person team may be 2 or 3 times more productive than a 10-person team. Collaboration efforts (process, bureaucracy, calls, meetings, mails, chats) increase exponentially with larger teams. AI can help with coding but not much with this collaboration process, at least not yet. Now, AI can make a small team much more productive because their collaboration overhead stays the same. But AI cannot help with a 100 person team because their collective collaboration overhead cannot be solved by AI. I guess the trend will move towards smaller sized teams that can effectively use AI.

Depends on if you think AI is more like a shovel or an excavator. The article to me implies a shovel: a tool used by one person to increase individual productivity. An excavator is not run by a single worker — it’s run by a team. If AI assisted coding is an excavator, a solo developer won’t outperform a 100 person dev team, because they won’t be able to operate the AI tooling efficiently or effectively.

I think they meant that the digging crew would also use excavators.

but it takes months for a team of 100 to o do anything, let alone make the decision to do so. Right now there is a sort of time arbitrage opportunity for single developers

Yeah. As we saw with the invention of excavators, we ran out of things to build and didn't need construction crews anymore.

Yeah, but AI is trivially cheap, unlike excavators.

If a solopreneur can buy an excavator, the corporate developers will get them too.

You need to retool the corporation, the way the company is organized, and retrain the workforce for the new way building. In addition you have to pull that of, while still keep the light on, for what you already have. It will be much easier for someone starting from scratch.

I do think many corporations will fail for this reason. But some will successfully adapt, and others will start fresh and have no baggage.

I do think it will be easier for very small organizations to compete than it was previously - which is great - but let's not fool ourselves that big companies won't maintain some competitive advantages.

Yeah, but the 100 person digging crew is going to get 100 excavators.

Have you ever been on a construction site? How many excavators do you think a company needs?

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