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The parent isn't wrong. Even assuming you have superhuman AI with unlimited funding, your bottleneck will be human prompting and curation. The person who assign

The parent isn't wrong. Even assuming you have superhuman AI with unlimited funding, your bottleneck will be human prompting and curation. The person who assigns more workers to that sector will scale faster and eat more of the market.

coldtea 4y ago
That's assuming some ever expanding workload. It's not like e.g. a company will start selling 10x of their product just because their productivity is 10x better due to AI. So it's not like their workload with increase 10x to match. This means a more or less same-ish workload. And if this takes them, say, X devs today (without AI), they could perhaps do it with 1/5th or 1/10th the devs plus AI tomorrow. No need to "assign more workers to the sector". Sure, some sectors with big expansion potential might grow their business too due to automation, but for most businesses it will just be increased productivity...
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Yeah, no. Firing everyone because AI can do iptables now is the sort of pipe dream you sell to a crazy one-man startup, not a pre-established business looking to save money. If you legitimately believe that people are paid for their "single threaded" potential to write software, what kind of business do you run? You're being unnecessarily fatalist and it's making your viewpoint sound as ridiculous as the self-proclaimed 10x devs that could lay off entire software teams because they wrote Homebrew in a weekend.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    >That's assuming some ever expanding workload. It's not like e.g. a company will start selling 10x of their product just because their productivity is 10x better due to AI. So it's not like their workload with increase 10x to match. This means a more or less same-ish workload. And if this takes them, say, X devs today (without AI), they could perhaps do it with 1/5th or 1/10th the devs plus AI tomorrow. No need to "assign more workers to the sector". Sure, some sectors with big expansion potential might grow their business too due to automation, but for most businesses it will just be increased productivity... >Yeah, no. Firing everyone because AI can do iptables now is the sort of pipe dream you sell to a crazy one-man startup, not a pre-established business looking to save money Notice how nobody said anything about "firing everyone"? Notice how I explicitly said "if this takes them, say, X devs today (without AI), they could perhaps do it with 1/5th or 1/10th the devs plus AI tomorrow"? I think ChatGPT would do better in understanding my comment. In fact let's try it: Q: Assume you read this comment: "It's not like a company will start selling 10x of their product just because their productivity is 10x better due to AI. So it's not like their workload with increase 10x to match. This means a more or less same-ish workload. And if this takes them, say, X devs today (without AI), they could perhaps do it with 1/5th or 1/10th the number of devs plus AI tomorrow". Does the above comment imply the company is going to fire all of its employees? A: No, the comment does not necessarily imply that the company is going to fire all of its employees. The comment does not make any specific claims about firing employees, but rather suggests that the company may be able to achieve the same results with fewer employees by leveraging AI technology. >If you legitimately believe that people are paid for their "single threaded" potential to write software, what kind of business do you run? First of all, there are millions of devs "paid for their 'single threaded' potential to write software". It's called code monkeys. Many roles don't need anything more than that: take specifications, prepared by someone else, and churn out this or that part of the code. Second, not sure why developers having more than "'single threaded' potential to write code" would change things. LLM AI doesn't have single threaded potential in writing software alone either. Third, of course you've missed the whole argument, which isn't that AI will write software alone. It is that the extra coding speed as helped by AI will means less developers will be needed for the same workload. And that in many cases workloads wont just expand as if there's some cosmic contract to always keep number of employed developers more or less the same. >as ridiculous as the self-proclaimed 10x devs that could lay off entire software teams because they wrote Homebrew in a weekend I've seen at least three different 10x developers do what "entire software teams" couldn't do in a year. And absolutely having 2 of those in our company meant we could do with hiring way less developers than we'd need otherwise. In areas where they weren't interested in, like UI or APIs, we had to get more people.

coldtea 4y ago

That's assuming some ever expanding workload. It's not like e.g. a company will start selling 10x of their product just because their productivity is 10x better due to AI. So it's not like their workload with increase 10x to match. This means a more or less same-ish workload. And if this takes them, say, X devs today (without AI), they could perhaps do it with 1/5th or 1/10th the devs plus AI tomorrow. No need to "assign more workers to the sector". Sure, some sectors with big expansion potential might grow their business too due to automation, but for most businesses it will just be increased productivity...

smoldesu 4y ago
Yeah, no. Firing everyone because AI can do iptables now is the sort of pipe dream you sell to a crazy one-man startup, not a pre-established business looking to save money. If you legitimately believe that people are paid for their "single threaded" potential to write software, what kind of business do you run? You're being unnecessarily fatalist and it's making your viewpoint sound as ridiculous as the self-proclaimed 10x devs that could lay off entire software teams because they wrote Homebrew in a weekend.
- coldtea 4y ago
  >That's assuming some ever expanding workload. It's not like e.g. a company will start selling 10x of their product just because their productivity is 10x better due to AI. So it's not like their workload with increase 10x to match. This means a more or less same-ish workload. And if this takes them, say, X devs today (without AI), they could perhaps do it with 1/5th or 1/10th the devs plus AI tomorrow. No need to "assign more workers to the sector". Sure, some sectors with big expansion potential might grow their business too due to automation, but for most businesses it will just be increased productivity... >Yeah, no. Firing everyone because AI can do iptables now is the sort of pipe dream you sell to a crazy one-man startup, not a pre-established business looking to save money Notice how nobody said anything about "firing everyone"? Notice how I explicitly said "if this takes them, say, X devs today (without AI), they could perhaps do it with 1/5th or 1/10th the devs plus AI tomorrow"? I think ChatGPT would do better in understanding my comment. In fact let's try it: Q: Assume you read this comment: "It's not like a company will start selling 10x of their product just because their productivity is 10x better due to AI. So it's not like their workload with increase 10x to match. This means a more or less same-ish workload. And if this takes them, say, X devs today (without AI), they could perhaps do it with 1/5th or 1/10th the number of devs plus AI tomorrow". Does the above comment imply the company is going to fire all of its employees? A: No, the comment does not necessarily imply that the company is going to fire all of its employees. The comment does not make any specific claims about firing employees, but rather suggests that the company may be able to achieve the same results with fewer employees by leveraging AI technology. >If you legitimately believe that people are paid for their "single threaded" potential to write software, what kind of business do you run? First of all, there are millions of devs "paid for their 'single threaded' potential to write software". It's called code monkeys. Many roles don't need anything more than that: take specifications, prepared by someone else, and churn out this or that part of the code. Second, not sure why developers having more than "'single threaded' potential to write code" would change things. LLM AI doesn't have single threaded potential in writing software alone either. Third, of course you've missed the whole argument, which isn't that AI will write software alone. It is that the extra coding speed as helped by AI will means less developers will be needed for the same workload. And that in many cases workloads wont just expand as if there's some cosmic contract to always keep number of employed developers more or less the same. >as ridiculous as the self-proclaimed 10x devs that could lay off entire software teams because they wrote Homebrew in a weekend I've seen at least three different 10x developers do what "entire software teams" couldn't do in a year. And absolutely having 2 of those in our company meant we could do with hiring way less developers than we'd need otherwise. In areas where they weren't interested in, like UI or APIs, we had to get more people.