I'm surprised people think LLMs, a thing which mainly excels at advertising, spam and writing code is going to generate that much economic activity.
e.g. an interesting possible canary in this coal mine is that there’s been a 200% increase in the rate of new apps appearing on Apple’s App Store, but it has not been accompanied by a 200% increase in the rate at which people are buying apps.
I don't believe this aligns with the reality of any major company, unless your business is in the literal sense "selling code" your revenue and profit is tangential to the quantity of code you produce. Google is a good example of this: most of their revenue and profit comes from their ad network, which is disconnected from their development productivity and instead heavily reliant on network effects and time in market. If I was a new competitor with infinite AI funds to throw at whatever problem I choose, I can't simply capture their market by developing an exact copy of Google's ad platform. In the same way, Google can't substantially grow their ad network by coding "more" or "better", they still need more customers and consumers to interact with their network to see any increase in revenue.
So it doesn't directly follow that a productivity increase will inherently follow an AI usage increase.
My impression is that most software development work is not profitable. Either the project is abandoned, or it fails, or it gets shipped but doesn’t generate positive ROI. But, like how venture capital works, the minority of projects that are successful make enough money to cover the rest.
Some portion of this is because demand for software projects in general is less than perfectly elastic. So more software does not automatically mean more software sales.
It also seems plausible that, in general, companies tend to fund the projects that are most likely to be profitable. They aren’t perfect at it, but I doubt they’re just rolling dice.
Which would imply that the new work companies can take on thanks to developer productivity gains will tend to be ones that are less likely to generate positive ROI.
meaning AI may only produce a net increase in waste, which only serves to erode profits.
Add to that that it’s been years now and we still don’t have an example of someone army-of-oneing a killer app or anything like that. It’s beginning to feel like another iteration of the amazing blockchain revolution that was always & forever just around the corner.
‘uber for my industry’ is not a sensible business strategy
Honestly, if you know guys whose bottleneck is pure software dev — please let me know, I have a good, experienced team in Eastern Europe, we can do wonders in product development. But coming up with sensible business ideas and executing on them in the real world is crazy hard and extremely rare.
what makes YouTube YouTube is not the video player it’s the servers that can handle petabytes of uploads a day and billions of views. YouTube software wise, is no different from the 100s of porn websites that are coded by small European teams
That would be half a trillion[1] redirected to regular people just from Google Ads.
[1] snatched my number from here: https://pixis.ai/blog/2025-google-advertising-benchmarks-for...
An AI generated man talking about his product building journey to make a pressure washer hose that didn't need power (in the AI video it didn't even have a water supply connected!) that was going to be banned in a week because it was too powerful so buy now.
I've seen AI slop before and scam ads before but the combination of the two gave me some real tingly spider-sense that things are going to get worse and that some unethical people will make a lot of money from it so be in no hurry to stop it.
And writing code is one of the most economically productive activities you can do. Why is it controversial that a technology is good at this?
The first time (or few times) you saw an advert, you were informed of the product's existence. I now know the Hyundai Elantra exists and could potentially be suitable for my vehicle needs. Mission accomplished.
The next 10,000 times it's just fighting over share of a finite market. I am not expecting to buy another car for another few years, so reminding me that I can choose an Elantra instead of a Corolla at all times is just vapourising cash. In fact, there's a chance that you do something obnoxious in your ad and actively burn brand reputation.
You could argue it's a take on the "everyone uses a different 5% of the features" problem-- that advertisement is going to be within the first "informational" window for someone, but maybe there are more efficient ways to not blast it at uninterested audiences.
One other angle might be asking if we still need some markets to be competitive in the first place. You don't need ads if it's a "when you need X, you'll know where to find it" sort of product. If we nationalized the insurance industry alone, we'd probably eliminate a detectable percentage of ad volume.