Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?
i was rolling my eyes at the hype, but reading about this is totally different from experiencing it. if you have any old repos out there - try it, you might actually be amazed. i'm not sure i buy the long-term "*90% productivity*" claims for complex, legacy enterprise systems, but for the boilerplate, libraries, build-tools, and refactoring? the gain is gigantic. all the time-consuming, nerve-wrecking stuff is mostly taken care of. you start off checking every diff like a hawk, expecting it to break things, but honestly, soon you see it's not necessary most of the time. you just keep your IDE open and feed the "analyze code" output back into it. in java, telling it to " add checkstyle, run mvn verify and repair " works well enough that you can actually go grab a coffee instead of fighting linter warnings. the theory is that what remains is just the logic and ideas . we'll see how that holds up when the architecture gets genuinely tangled. but for now, letting it branch off, create boilerplate, and write a simple test while you just iterate on the spec works shockingly well. you only write source code when it's too annoying to write down the spec in plain english. it raises the real question: if your competitor Y just fired 90% of their developers to save a buck, would you blindly follow suit? or would you keep your team, use this massive leverage, and just *dwarf* Y with a vastly better product?
Discussion Highlights (20 comments)
aurareturn
In certain industries, increasing productivity by 90% does not mean 90% increase in profit. This is because growth depends on market TAM and growth rate. Another way of increasing profit is to simply reduce your headcount by 90% while keeping the same profit.* Hence, I think some companies will keep downsizing. Some companies will hire. It depends a lot. *Assuming 90% productivity increase.
_wire_
"I just got my third coffee and I'm feeling really good about the quality of this code. I don't even bother to look at it. Keeps my tests simple to not test at all. You know, 'in theory'. Of course when the architecture gets genuinely tangled... Just keep your IDE open so the code knows where to go. Whoa, too much caffeine, super sleepy..." Terafab is suddenly making so much sense!
lordkrandel
Why do people keep ralking about AI as it actually worked? I still don't see ANY proof that it doesn't generate a total unmaintainable unsecure mess, that since you didn't develop, you don't know how to fix. Like running a F1 Ferrari on a countryside road: useless and dangerous
iExploder
yes you fire if you are a burned out company that only needs to maintain its product and slowly die... you hire more if you are growth and have new ideas just never had the chance to implement them as they were not practical of feasible at that level of tech (non-assisted humans clicking code and taking sick leaves)
conartist6
Gotta fire everyone, or else "too many cooks" will mean that even those temporary productivity gains go up in smoke. Remember sometimes the most productive thing to have is not money or people but time with your ideas.
giantg2
I feel like the ideas have always been the tough part. Finding novel ideas with a good return is extremely tough.
jaen
That's assuming every developer can get the same AI efficiency boost and contribute meaningfully to any feature, which is unfortunately not really the case. Seniors can adjust, but eg. junior frontend-only devs might be doomed in both situations, as they might not be able to contribute enough to business-critical features to justify their costs and most frontend-related tasks will be taken over by the "10x" seniors.
matt_s
Developers are going to be more productive, just not how you think. If history is going to rhyme, then the software industry will enter into a self-serving productivity craze building all sorts of software tooling, frameworks, ralph wiggum loop variants, MCPs, etc. much like the surge in JS frameworks and variants in the past. Most of those things will not have any business value. Software devs, myself included, love to do things "because I can" and not necessarily because they should. Smart organizations will not just deliver better products but likely start products that they were hesitant to start before because the cost of starting is a lot closer to zero. Smart engineering leadership will encourage developers into delivering value and not self-serving, endless iterations of tooling enhancements, etc. If I was a CTO and my competitor Y fired 90% of their devs, I'd try to secure funding to hire their top talent and retain them. The vitriol alone could fuel some interesting creations and when competitor Y realizes things later, their top talent will have moved on.
marcyb5st
If I were to run the company potentially mostly focus on better products with the exception of firing those that don't adopt the technology. If it is a big company the answer is and will always be: whatever makes the stock price rise the most.
NotGMan
Why not both?
rsynnott
> boilerplate Ruby on Rails and its imitators blew away tons of boilerplate. Despite some hype at the time about a productivity revolution, it didn’t _really_ change that much. > , libraries, build-tools, Ensure what you mean by this; what bearing do our friends the magic robots have on these? > and refactoring Again, IntelliJ did not really cause a productivity revolution by making refactoring trivial about 20 years ago. Also, refactoring is kind of a solved problem, due to IntelliJ et al; what’s an LLM getting you there that decent deterministic tooling doesn’t?
j45
You have your devs be engineering managers over the tools.
dare944
False dichotomy. If your company is at the point of firing lots of people "to save a buck" its way past the point of caring about delivering a better product.
GenerWork
>do you fire devs or build better products? I think that it's more along the lines of "do you fire people" instead of just "do you fire devs". Fewer devs means less of a need for PMs, so they can be let go as well, and maybe with the rise of AI assisted design tools, you don't need as many UX people, so you let some of them go as well. As for building better products, I feel like that's a completely different topic than using AI for productivity gains, but only because at the end of the day you need buy in from upper management in order to build the features/redo existing features/both that will make the product better. I should also mention I'm viewing this from the position of someone who works at an established company and not a startup, so it may differ.
gedy
Productivity really means nothing across companies and the software industry. So we code faster, but honestly problem I see is companies ask us to code stupid or worthless things in many cases. CTO is rewriting company platform (by himself with AI) and is convinced it's 100x productivity. But when you step back and look at the broader picture, he's rewriting what something like Rails, .NET, or Spring gave us 15-20 years ago? It's just in languages and code styles he is (only) familiar with. That's not 100x for the business, sorry...
animal531
I use it near daily and there is definitely a positive there, BUT its nothing like what the OP statement would make it up to be. If it is writing both the code and the tests then you're going to find that its tests are remarkable, they just work. At least until you deploy to a live state and start testing for yourself, then you'll notice that its mostly only testing the exact code that it wrote, its not confrontational or trying to find errors and it already assumes that its going to work. It won't ever come up with the majority of breaking cases that a developer will by itself, you will need to guide it. Also while fixing those the odds of introducing other breaking changes are decent, and after enough prompts you are going to lose coherency no matter what you do. It definitely makes a lot of boilerplate code easier, but what you don't notice is that its just moving the difficult to find problems into hidden new areas. That fancy code that it wrote maybe doesn't take any building blocks, lower levels such as database optimization etc. into account. Even for a simple application a half-decent developer can create something that will run quite a bit faster. If you start bringing these problems to it then it might be able to optimize them, but the amount of time that's going to take is non-negligible. It takes developers time to sit on code, learn it along with the problem space and how to tie them together effectively. If you take that away there is no learning, you're just the monkey copy-pasting the produced output from the black box and hoping that you get a result that works. Even worse is that every step you take doesn't bring you any closer to the solution, its pretty much random. So what is it good for? It can both read, "understand", translate, write and explain things to a sufficient degree much faster than us humans. But if you are (at the moment) trusting it at anything past the method level for code then you're just shooting yourself in the foot, you're just not feeling the pain until later. In a day you can have it generate for example a whole website, backend, db etc. for your new business idea but that's not a "product", it might as well be a promotional video that you throw away once you've used it to impress the investors. For now that might still work, but people are already catching on and beginning to wise up.
gamblor956
AI tooling does not provide productivity gains unless you consider it productive to skip the boilerplate portion of software development, which you can already do by using a framework, or you never plan to get past the MVP stage of a product, as refactoring the AI spaghetti would take several magnitudes more work than doing it with humans from the beginning. Amazon has demonstrated that it takes just as longer, or longer, to have senior devs review LLM output than it would to just have the senior devs do the programming in the first place. But now your senior devs are wasted on reviewing instead of developing or engineering. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, and Palantir have all suffered multiple losses in the tens of millions (or more) due to AI output issues. Now that Microsoft has finally realized how bad LLMs really are at generating useful output, they've begun removing AI functionality from Windows. Product quality matters more than time to market. Especially in tech, the first-to-market is almost never the company that dominates, so it's truly bizarre that VCs are always so focused on their investments trying to be first to market instead of best to market. If Competitor Y just fired 90% of their developers, I would have a toast with my entire human team. And a few months later, we'd own the market with our superior product.
hirako2000
Assuming you are primarily selling software. Situation a/ llm increase developer's productivity: you hire more developers as you cash profit. If you don't your competitor will. b/ llm doesn't increase productivity, you keep cruising. You rejoice seeing some competitors lay off. Reality shows dissonance with these only possible scenarios. Absurd decision making, a mistake? No mistake. Many tech companies are facing difficulties, they need to lose weight to remain profitable, and appease the shareholders demand for bigger margins. How to do this without a backlash? Ai is replacing developers, Anthropic's CEO said engineers don't write code anymore, role obsolete in 6 months. It naturally makes sense we have to let some of them go. If the prophecy doesn't turn true, nobody ever get fired for buying IBM.
lateforwork
You still need humans to manage the whole lifecycle, including monitoring the live site, being on-call, handling incidents, triaging bugs, deploying fixes, supporting users and so on. For greenfield development you don't need as many software engineers. Some developers (the top 10%) are still needed to guide AI and make architectural decisions, but the remaining 90% will work on the lifecycle management task mentioned above. The productivity gains can be used to produce more software, and if you are able to sell the software you produce should result in a revenue boost. But if you produce more than you can sell then some people will be laid off.
ashwinnair99
The companies quietly doing the firing will say they're doing the building. The answer you get depends entirely on who you ask and what they're trying to justify.