Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

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In 2020, there are two companies that are competitors with each other. They each employ 100 programmers to do their job, and we all know how those organizations operated; perpetually behind, each feature added generating yet more possible future features, we've all lived it and are still largely living it today.

In 2026, both companies decide that AI can accelerate their developers by a factor of 10x. I'm not asserting that's reality, it's just a nice round number.

Company 1 fires 90 of their programmers and does the same work with 10.

Company 2 keeps all their programmers and does ten times the work they used to do, and maybe ends up hiring more.

Who wins in the market?

Of course the answer is "it depends" because it always is but I would say the winning space for Company 1 is substantially smaller than Company 2. They need a very precise combination of market circumstances. One that is not so precise that it doesn't exist, but it's a risky bet that you're in one of the exceptions.

In the time when the acceleration is occurring and we haven't settled in to the new reality yet the Company 1 answer seems superficially appealing to the bean counters, but it only takes one defector in a given market to go with Company 2's solution to force the entire rest of their industry to follow suit to compete properly.

The value generation by one programmer that can be possibly captured by that programmer's salary is probably not going down in the medium and long term either.

Your hypothetical ignores the distribution of programmer talent. Company 1 can pay more per person and hire 10x programmers, who can then leverage AI to produce the same or more as Company 2.

We have seen this in other knowledge industries. U.S. legal sector job count is about the same today as it was 20 years ago. But billing rates have exploded and revenues in the 200 largest firms have increased more than 50% after adjusting for inflation. Higher-end law firms have leveraged technology to be able to service much more of the demand and push out smaller regional competitors.

I think paying significantly more was a very localized thing that happened for AI researchers who were familiar with the alchemy that made GPT4 suddenly work much better than anything else seen before.

Of course it does. It ignores a lot of things. Mostly I just want to present the view that things aren't entirely hopeless and the entire industry is doomed to contract by 90% because of AI. Your legal system point also fits in precisely with what I'm trying to convey, just in a different direction.

The problem with this idea of feature backlog, at least everywhere I've worked, is what you really have is an idea backlog. You have some things people want to build, and maybe a business analyst or product owner has done a first pass. But they're far from the rubber-meets-the-road part where someone needs to write out a detailed spec based on the exact current state of the app/system, and the developers start asking questions as they run into unspecified edge cases--all of which usually means sitting down with the client again over a series of meetings.

AI coding agents help speed up none of that. Meanwhile the developers are either sitting in meetings or working on something else while the product owners hash it out with the client.

And sometimes, after all that, you realize the client can get 95% of what they're asking for if you just tweak some existing feature. Everyone's mostly happy, the app stays less complex.

An incorrect "reply" link, I think?

This resonates strongly with me, in that all that extra margin has to be spent on something other than dividends

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