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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

I think it's less armchair speculating about the observable outcome, that people are losing their jobs, but the why. AI coding tools aren't making 10x developers, they aren't even making 1.5x developers. They also aren't making "PMs who code" or "designers who code."

It would be really cool if this was the case, I would be singing the praises of these tools finally realizing Stallman's dream of end users who can take control of all the software in their lives for their own benefit. And the huge gains we would see in open source where "man I wish there was a tool that could…" becomes "I'm gonna make a tool that…"

So personally I think it's just a continuation of the belt tightening that was and still is occurring across the economy. I don't think our industry is particularly special on this, everyone is trying to cut headcount right now.

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> they aren't even making 1.5x developers

I won't try to speak for anyone other than myself, but my multiplier is definitely over 1.5x, probably higher than 5x.

I choose to sit on my hands in my freed up time so upper management does not catch on to and exploit this fact. Eventually they will though via overzealous coworkers.

It’s not hard to 5x your productivity when you were close to zero to start with.

Is that you, boss?

People with a lower multiplier are either in the minority of developers solving genuinely hard/novel problems or, more likely, they've just not figured out how to tap into AI's potential.

Granted, to your point, a decent chunk of the HN crowd belongs to the former and can't relate to us paycheck stealers.

I always hear people say this, but it’s not clear to me what exactly is so difficult about using AI that otherwise-competent developers “can’t figure it out”

My hunch is it's a combination of

* coming in with a bias of not wanting it to work

* having too high of an expectation

* giving up too early

* not trying SOTA models

* not taking the effort to communicate intuitive or painfully obvious things

But perhaps it is too dumb to solve the type of problems you guys are working on and no amount of cajoling will help. All I know is "it works for me."

It’s easy to produce a high volume of code, sure, but it is not equally easy to test, verify, and integrate it. And with a high volume of code, there is a high volume of shit to review & test & integrate. For companies that give a shit about not vibe coding their way into a disaster (because they have lucrative enterprise contracts that depend on reliability & security), that’s the real blocker. (Plus, these types of projects are big, not trivial, and things are harder to integrate & properly test because of that.)

Not to mention, if a team wants to keep a semblance of understanding of what they own & ship… it can be exhausting to have a huge volume of new code coming into the system.

It’s definitely a productivity unlock. For sure. But there are a lot of knock-on effects we’re still figuring out that counteract how much extra “value” we’re shipping

In my case, the volume of code is roughly the same. I'm not using the efficiency towards pumping out more code, just using it to be AFK more.

I spend enough time iterating and refining to the point I'm comfortable taking ownership of the outputted code. Perhaps hypocritically, I do mald when people upload code for review that they clearly haven't taken the effort to read through critically.

Well, but AI also helps by writing good comments & docs :-) (one thing Im usually very brief)

> I won't try to speak for anyone other than myself, but my multiplier is definitely over 1.5x, probably higher than 5x.

So you now complete in a single Monday what used to take you Monday-Friday?

Can you even review that fast? How many LoC per day are you generating?

More like a day's worth of coding condensed into half an hour. Time to review/test is mostly unchanged.

Day to day is mainly minor feature additions into a stable product so not a huge amount of code churn.

Rather "do in 1 week what was 1 month before"

Agreed, the tech job market was bad before AI was useful.

The "I'm gonna make a tool" thing is slowly happening and will probably help Linux, knocking on wood... https://x.com/xpasky/status/2030016470730658181

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