Sam Altman says AI will make coders 10x more productive, not replace them

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2 points·daviducolo··4 comments

This must be the new talking point. Heard my dad say the exact same thing (hes a finance guy who loves podcasts and talking with sharks). Parents wanted to know if I thought AI was why I was having a hard time getting back into software, NO! They friggen offshored it all to India you out of touch bozos!

I wonder how much / quickly we’ll find out that raw intelligence is not the bottleneck. Writing ten times more code would probably make me slam face first into a ton of other bottlenecks.

If there is the same amount of work (debatable but plausible), and developers are 10x as efficient, doesn’t that mean you need 1/10 the workers? Businesses aren’t noted for their charitable employment of needless workers, so you could re-phrase Altman’s statement as: “90% of developers will be redundant”. Replaced by AI, if you will…

Or, of course, there could be 10x the work suddenly made available. Probably homed right next to this bridge I happen to have for sale…

This is the big question. Will the new normal be feature bloat/enshittification in 1/10 the time? Or 10x speed of refactoring to evolve more rapidly? Or 10x the number of crappy apps and marginal SaaS offerings?

We're still in the hype side of the cycle, where there are some successes but lots of inconclusive struggle, and employers like mine forbid the tools out of IP and security concerns. If the tools prove their worth, there'll be a shrinking of developer ranks. Email shrank the mail room, web sites shrank the printing business, robots shrank the skilled manufacturing base.

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