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Comment by rnxrx | Hacker News Reader

Thus does kind of beg the question: If developers are being laid off because AI is better/faster/cheaper or makes all their people 10x or whatever fig leaf, what happens if the required tooling ends up being more expensive? From the investor’s point of view is the drag of employee costs better or worse than a ballooning expense item?

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They lay people off and look good in front of investors. Then they hire people, talk about "growth", and once again look good in front of investors.

This would never fly if stock market was rational. But it never is.

And if/when companies need to scale back their ai investments they can spin it too and the stock market will eat it up.

They are just being AI efficient, and doing more while spending less on it :)

I wonder if this will happen before they have some obligatory debloating of the investors exposition to the company.

I suppose if it all works out it'll end up way more expensive than the employees the models displaced ever were. These kinds of technologies usually end up as an oligopoly at best, and those players will have a wide moat by then, and the things these models build will be tweaked such that no other model or human being can realistically work on them anymore, and then they can price gouge everyone to the brink of unprofitability.

At least the models don’t need health insurance, office space, a cafeteria, or have a threat of unionizing.

The model provider would be like a union, at least if unions had absolute control over their members, could take them all away at any time forever with no substantial negative consequences to itself, and spend billions on employer lock-in so switching to the competition is worse than paying the 12% model salary raise.

Because they are not people or alive, you can literally torture them if it gives you a mild increase in performance. For all practical purposes you can't do that to living humans. What is the price to put on being able to do that? It might weight the scales a bit for some employers.

Shh, that's the quiet part the investors don't want to say outloud.

There's 10-15 labs near the frontier, and like 30 serious inference providers, over 70 total on OpenRouter.

With research and hardware near guaranteed to bring the efficiency way up, I'm not scared here of massive price hikes.

There is no moat.

> If developers are being laid off because AI is better/faster/cheaper

This is, in my opinion, tripe. SWEs are being laid off because of post-Covid over-hiring. The only evidence for labour destruction is in junior hires. But not because anyone is being fired, but because entry-level jobs are being cannibalised.

In general economy that is not the stock market is looking less and less great. Answer to this is to tighten the belt and that means losing employees. Especially as there has not been any new great revenue sources outside AI in recent years.

> Especially as there has not been any new great revenue sources outside AI in recent years.

Nobody can make a profit with AI. Any clever idea can be cloned with AI, competition makes it unprofitable. No moat, no arbitrage opportunity. "During the gold rush, the only people making money were the men selling shovels."

We can definitely do amazing things with AI, and it makes us have superpowers, but so does everyone else. My competition also uses AI. I have to keep up with an AI powered competition now.

The shovels are the datacenters. China and America are building them. Even after the valuations puff out, that infrastructure will remain as a massive competitive advantage to those economies.

I am not convinced this will be true. The big piles of GPUs make sense when the models will change multiple times before the hardware fails; but when there's no more money for rapidly training models, the best can be encoded as circuits in much more energy efficient hardware, rendering even the new power supply infrastructure for the data centres useless.

I suspect AI would have to get drastically more expensive before it starts looking worse than payroll. If one developer using Claude Code can effectively substitute for 2 developers, you are already coming out ahead at current API pricing assuming very heavy usage, your cost is going to be ~1.5x developer (factoring in beyond salary - benefits, PTO, the other overhead that comes with having employees).

So you're getting 2 for the price of 1.5. Scale that up to 500 devs at a big company and it's a big chunk of change saved on payroll.

Keeping your headcount or hiring humans instead, AI would have to start to cost upwards of $15k/month/developer or more before it costs more than hiring. You're looking at about 4 billion tokens per month before humans start to break even or are cheaper.

You're starting from the assumption that its a 2x benefit. That's a massive leap.

True, that was more hypothetical if it got good enough to 2x.

But even taking a more realistic 1.25x (20% time savings) gain, lets say you drop from 500 to 400 devs, you'd have to hit around $4,000/dev/month in token spend before hiring humans again would break even.

Payroll is just expensive, in most companies it's by far the biggest expense. AI still has to cost drastically more before investors would call it out as being worse than increasing headcount, from a pure dollars perspective.

Also assuming that current API pricing is sustainable and not subsidized.

This is economy dependant. It’s really Indians why will take the brunt of AI job losses.

Interesting point. Outsource the outsourcers...

More expensive is a difficult calculation: faster can sometimes warrant the higher cost, if it means you can go faster to market. Also, LLMs work 24x7, and can be scaled up and down as needed. Faster to off board an LLM than to fire an employee (especially here in Europe). So, even if AI is more expensive than a developer, from TCO and ROI perspective it can still make business sense.

"AI" is just a cover for laying ppl off and saving cost. But the pendulum will swing the the other way and the companies will realise that knowledgeable ppl are still required to generate and utilize the generated code. No serious company can run with vibe-coded apps generated by laymen.

There is no profit, expense, revenue. Those don't matter. Only thing that matters is stock price goes up, and laying off makes stock price go up. When laying off make stock price go down, then laying off stop.

I imagine layoffs are also very much "this quarter and next quarter" with regards to investor visibility.

While LLM Opex is "some future quarter" and very easy to co-mingle with other expenses.

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