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Comment by rdiddly | Hacker News Reader

They clearly don't mean one person with AI now vs. 100 people with AI now. They're comparing one person with AI now to 100 people without AI before.

Regardless, one person still costs 1/100 as much as 100 people. Let's say each of the 100 adopts AI and multiplies their productivity by 100. Does their company need its total engineering productivity multiplied by 100? They might settle for let's say 3X and save 97% of the costs by firing 97 people.

(I tend to ignore most of the hype and I'm dubious about that 100X figure, but I'm taking it at face value here for illustrative purposes.)

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OP here. While this logic holds, large companies don’t move fast.

In 2018, I wrote about scaling big while staying small using serverless computing (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/scale-big-while-s...). But by 2020, instead of leaner teams, we saw more hiring and even bigger orgs—ironically, even at companies selling serverless services.

Why? Because incentives at large companies favor empire-building (prestige from managing big teams) over efficiency. I expect the same inertia with AI: solo devs will fully embrace AI, serverless, and freemium to race ahead, while big teams will adopt AI at a crawl.

Even if that’s what they mean (and I agree, that’s plausible, though not obvious) it’s still an asinine statement in the context of their broader thesis: advancements in generative AI are going to power the rise of the solopreneur. In absolute terms, an individual developer may be more productive in 3 years than they are today, but in relative terms, they will still be underpowered when compared to large teams building complex software. It only makes sense if we also assume the consumer and quality bar of today as well — and I don’t think LLMs are expected to crack time travel.

There will still be successful solopreneurs, just as there are today, but the idea that tooling-based productivity gains for individual developers are going to drive a power shift towards solo development and away from team-based companies is stupid.

That's a good point, and there's probably a sweet spot somewhere between "a few" and Dunbar's number, that represents the typically-most-efficient team size going forward.

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