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> An engineer with AI tool can now outbuild a 100-person engineering team. What an insane statement. If the tooling improves that much the team of 100 will als

by wkirby 2y ago

> An engineer with AI tool can now outbuild a 100-person engineering team. What an insane statement. If the tooling improves that much the team of 100 will also improve. A worker with a shovel only outperforms the other workers if they’re still digging with sticks. That sets aside the assumption that a few years from now we’ll see any material improvement at all. More likely we’ll see more wasted hype on some new revolution.

exe34 2y ago
> If the tooling improves that much the team of 100 will also improve. I'm not sure this follows - I find as team size grows, the amount of time spent on synchronization approaches asymptotically to 100%.
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  Great. So a team of 100 with LLMs is still faster than a team of 100 without even if they spend the same amount of time on synchronization? Or did I miss something here?
  - exe34 2y ago
    well if they have more slop to get through, they'll spend even more time going over the more slop to find the useful bits. imagine 97 of them believe the machine upfront and you have to convince them that the code is shit. shudders
    - jvanderbot 2y ago
      Sure but maintenance is just part of the definition of productivity. You have to do maintenance too to be productive. (On long time scales)
jrsj 2y ago
Yeah I really don’t get why people keep hyping AI like this. It really doesn’t make things go that much faster. At best you’re able to generate prototypes more quickly + get better autocomplete. Nothing particularly revolutionary there. Anyone claiming a generalized 100x, 10x, or even 2x productivity gain is either delusional or trying to sell you something. Possibly both. The companies saying they are reducing the size of their workforce because of gains they’re getting from AI are probably just telling investors what they want to hear while cutting costs for the same reason they always have.
- logicchains 2y ago
  >Anyone claiming a generalized 100x, 10x, or even 2x productivity gain is either delusional or trying to sell you something I don't understand how anyone who spends a couple hours or more per day coding new functionality couldn't at least double their productivity with LLMs, unless their organisation prohibits LLM usage. Even just limiting the LLM to writing unit tests would still save that much time.
  - jvanderbot 2y ago
    The thing is, tab complete using LLMs is really great. But I still read it, then press tab, then press enter, then type a few chars, then wait. Sometimes I get 1 good line from that. Sometimes I get 30. Usually I get 10 bad lines and have to type a bit more to coax out 8 good ones. It just looks faster but typing was NEVER the bottleneck for coding. Where it really flies, though, is building tooling around a well known API. FML if I ever have to write AWS CDK or AWS API calls without an LLM again. You're looking at ages of reading through really bad docs to get it going. For that, which is a 1% task of convenience for most jobs, I can use most LLM output verbatim. But that's like I said less than 1% of the job, and only then when the core software is done.
    - moltar 2y ago
      Hm, I’m a CDK pro (4y of full time experience). I used all LLMs, except latest Claude model. All were bad in my estimation and just got in the way. I don’t use them for CDK code anymore.
      - jvanderbot 2y ago
        Yeah! That's exactly the thing. It's passable for novices and bad for experts. But I don't need expert level CDK I need an instance to start up. Hate it or love it that's all I need.
    - pama 2y ago
      Did you notice how much better things are today (eg Claude Sonnet 3.7) than they were 1 year ago? Don’t you expect things will not improve in the next year? Even R1, a public weights model, can add huge value when left to code in a loop.
onlypassingthru 2y ago
I'm not sure your example tracks. With an excavator, one person can outperform a 100 person digging crew. AI is the next excavator.
- dghlsakjg 2y ago
  Yeah, but AI is trivially cheap, unlike excavators. If a solopreneur can buy an excavator, the corporate developers will get them too.
  - einarfd 2y ago
    You need to retool the corporation, the way the company is organized, and retrain the workforce for the new way building. In addition you have to pull that of, while still keep the light on, for what you already have. It will be much easier for someone starting from scratch.
    - sanderjd 2y ago
      I do think many corporations will fail for this reason. But some will successfully adapt, and others will start fresh and have no baggage. I do think it will be easier for very small organizations to compete than it was previously - which is great - but let's not fool ourselves that big companies won't maintain some competitive advantages.
- NAHWheatCracker 2y ago
  If 1 person can use an excavator/AI, then a 100 person crew can use 100 excavators/AIs. Capabilities have increased for everyone, not just for 1 man operations.
  - 6stringmerc 2y ago
    Have you seen how big excavators are physically? There are functional limits to certain tools. I can see how software could become a hot mess if AI tools aren’t calibrated or the human element makes a mess of combining disparate parts.
rdiddly 2y ago
They clearly don't mean one person with AI now vs. 100 people with AI now. They're comparing one person with AI now to 100 people without AI before. Regardless, one person still costs 1/100 as much as 100 people. Let's say each of the 100 adopts AI and multiplies their productivity by 100. Does their company need its total engineering productivity multiplied by 100? They might settle for let's say 3X and save 97% of the costs by firing 97 people. (I tend to ignore most of the hype and I'm dubious about that 100X figure, but I'm taking it at face value here for illustrative purposes.)
- wkirby 2y ago
  Even if that’s what they mean (and I agree, that’s plausible, though not obvious) it’s still an asinine statement in the context of their broader thesis: advancements in generative AI are going to power the rise of the solopreneur. In absolute terms, an individual developer may be more productive in 3 years than they are today, but in relative terms, they will still be underpowered when compared to large teams building complex software. It only makes sense if we also assume the consumer and quality bar of today as well — and I don’t think LLMs are expected to crack time travel. There will still be successful solopreneurs, just as there are today, but the idea that tooling-based productivity gains for individual developers are going to drive a power shift towards solo development and away from team-based companies is stupid.
  - rdiddly 2y ago
    That's a good point, and there's probably a sweet spot somewhere between "a few" and Dunbar's number, that represents the typically-most-efficient team size going forward.
- QueensGambit 2y ago
  OP here. While this logic holds, large companies don’t move fast. In 2018, I wrote about scaling big while staying small using serverless computing (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/scale-big-while-staying-small-serverless-gcp/ https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/scale-big-while-s...). But by 2020, instead of leaner teams, we saw more hiring and even bigger orgs—ironically, even at companies selling serverless services. Why? Because incentives at large companies favor empire-building (prestige from managing big teams) over efficiency. I expect the same inertia with AI: solo devs will fully embrace AI, serverless, and freemium to race ahead, while big teams will adopt AI at a crawl.
QueensGambit 2y ago
Author of the post here. We’re a 4-member team running 4 products with 4,500+ paying customers. No sales team, no infrastructure team - just freemium and serverless computing (Firebase) doing the heavy lifting. I’ve been a developer and founder for 20+ years, and I know that 15 years ago, each product would’ve required at least a 30-member team to build, maintain, and sell. This isn’t hypothetical, it already happened to us. Most of this leverage comes from internet distribution (freemium) and cloud computing (serverless), not AI. (Though we do use AI to answer support questions—since my cofounder is the only one handling them.) Now with AI, I argue that a solo engineer could outbuild a 100-member team in a couple of years. Given how much productivity has already increased, why is that an insane claim?
- skmurphy 2y ago
  How do you determine either what features to build or the next product to develop? I understand you are focused freemium as a goto market strategy with no dedicated sales or marketing team members. What tools are you displacing (e.g. Excel)?
  - QueensGambit 2y ago
    > How do you determine what features to build or the next product to develop? My co-founder handles support, so he decides what to build next based on customer discussions. If a problem is big enough for a specific segment, we turn it into a separate product. > What tools are you displacing (e.g., Excel)? Most SMBs prefer to stay with Google Forms/Sheets rather than switching to a full-fledged CRM like HubSpot. But embedding Google Forms in their website affects their branding. We beautify and enhance Forms into a CRM, so they don’t have to migrate. I wrote about it here: https://manidoraisamy.com/developer-forever/post/can-you-use-google-forms-as-a-crm.anc-782c1657-2fff-40fd-9c91-d4b5b4eb90a4.html https://manidoraisamy.com/developer-forever/post/can-you-use...

by wkirby 2y ago

exe34 2y ago

> If the tooling improves that much the team of 100 will also improve. I'm not sure this follows - I find as team size grows, the amount of time spent on synchronization approaches asymptotically to 100%.

jvanderbot 2y ago
Great. So a team of 100 with LLMs is still faster than a team of 100 without even if they spend the same amount of time on synchronization? Or did I miss something here?
- exe34 2y ago
  well if they have more slop to get through, they'll spend even more time going over the more slop to find the useful bits. imagine 97 of them believe the machine upfront and you have to convince them that the code is shit. shudders
  - jvanderbot 2y ago
    Sure but maintenance is just part of the definition of productivity. You have to do maintenance too to be productive. (On long time scales)

jrsj 2y ago

Yeah I really don’t get why people keep hyping AI like this. It really doesn’t make things go that much faster. At best you’re able to generate prototypes more quickly + get better autocomplete. Nothing particularly revolutionary there. Anyone claiming a generalized 100x, 10x, or even 2x productivity gain is either delusional or trying to sell you something. Possibly both. The companies saying they are reducing the size of their workforce because of gains they’re getting from AI are probably just telling investors what they want to hear while cutting costs for the same reason they always have.

logicchains 2y ago
>Anyone claiming a generalized 100x, 10x, or even 2x productivity gain is either delusional or trying to sell you something I don't understand how anyone who spends a couple hours or more per day coding new functionality couldn't at least double their productivity with LLMs, unless their organisation prohibits LLM usage. Even just limiting the LLM to writing unit tests would still save that much time.
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  The thing is, tab complete using LLMs is really great. But I still read it, then press tab, then press enter, then type a few chars, then wait. Sometimes I get 1 good line from that. Sometimes I get 30. Usually I get 10 bad lines and have to type a bit more to coax out 8 good ones. It just looks faster but typing was NEVER the bottleneck for coding. Where it really flies, though, is building tooling around a well known API. FML if I ever have to write AWS CDK or AWS API calls without an LLM again. You're looking at ages of reading through really bad docs to get it going. For that, which is a 1% task of convenience for most jobs, I can use most LLM output verbatim. But that's like I said less than 1% of the job, and only then when the core software is done.
  - moltar 2y ago
    Hm, I’m a CDK pro (4y of full time experience). I used all LLMs, except latest Claude model. All were bad in my estimation and just got in the way. I don’t use them for CDK code anymore.
    - jvanderbot 2y ago
      Yeah! That's exactly the thing. It's passable for novices and bad for experts. But I don't need expert level CDK I need an instance to start up. Hate it or love it that's all I need.
  - pama 2y ago
    Did you notice how much better things are today (eg Claude Sonnet 3.7) than they were 1 year ago? Don’t you expect things will not improve in the next year? Even R1, a public weights model, can add huge value when left to code in a loop.

onlypassingthru 2y ago

I'm not sure your example tracks. With an excavator, one person can outperform a 100 person digging crew. AI is the next excavator.

dghlsakjg 2y ago
Yeah, but AI is trivially cheap, unlike excavators. If a solopreneur can buy an excavator, the corporate developers will get them too.
- einarfd 2y ago
  You need to retool the corporation, the way the company is organized, and retrain the workforce for the new way building. In addition you have to pull that of, while still keep the light on, for what you already have. It will be much easier for someone starting from scratch.
  - sanderjd 2y ago
    I do think many corporations will fail for this reason. But some will successfully adapt, and others will start fresh and have no baggage. I do think it will be easier for very small organizations to compete than it was previously - which is great - but let's not fool ourselves that big companies won't maintain some competitive advantages.
NAHWheatCracker 2y ago
If 1 person can use an excavator/AI, then a 100 person crew can use 100 excavators/AIs. Capabilities have increased for everyone, not just for 1 man operations.
- 6stringmerc 2y ago
  Have you seen how big excavators are physically? There are functional limits to certain tools. I can see how software could become a hot mess if AI tools aren’t calibrated or the human element makes a mess of combining disparate parts.

rdiddly 2y ago

They clearly don't mean one person with AI now vs. 100 people with AI now. They're comparing one person with AI now to 100 people without AI before. Regardless, one person still costs 1/100 as much as 100 people. Let's say each of the 100 adopts AI and multiplies their productivity by 100. Does their company need its total engineering productivity multiplied by 100? They might settle for let's say 3X and save 97% of the costs by firing 97 people. (I tend to ignore most of the hype and I'm dubious about that 100X figure, but I'm taking it at face value here for illustrative purposes.)

wkirby 2y ago
Even if that’s what they mean (and I agree, that’s plausible, though not obvious) it’s still an asinine statement in the context of their broader thesis: advancements in generative AI are going to power the rise of the solopreneur. In absolute terms, an individual developer may be more productive in 3 years than they are today, but in relative terms, they will still be underpowered when compared to large teams building complex software. It only makes sense if we also assume the consumer and quality bar of today as well — and I don’t think LLMs are expected to crack time travel. There will still be successful solopreneurs, just as there are today, but the idea that tooling-based productivity gains for individual developers are going to drive a power shift towards solo development and away from team-based companies is stupid.
- rdiddly 2y ago
  That's a good point, and there's probably a sweet spot somewhere between "a few" and Dunbar's number, that represents the typically-most-efficient team size going forward.
QueensGambit 2y ago
OP here. While this logic holds, large companies don’t move fast. In 2018, I wrote about scaling big while staying small using serverless computing (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/scale-big-while-staying-small-serverless-gcp/ https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/scale-big-while-s...). But by 2020, instead of leaner teams, we saw more hiring and even bigger orgs—ironically, even at companies selling serverless services. Why? Because incentives at large companies favor empire-building (prestige from managing big teams) over efficiency. I expect the same inertia with AI: solo devs will fully embrace AI, serverless, and freemium to race ahead, while big teams will adopt AI at a crawl.

QueensGambit 2y ago

Author of the post here. We’re a 4-member team running 4 products with 4,500+ paying customers. No sales team, no infrastructure team - just freemium and serverless computing (Firebase) doing the heavy lifting. I’ve been a developer and founder for 20+ years, and I know that 15 years ago, each product would’ve required at least a 30-member team to build, maintain, and sell. This isn’t hypothetical, it already happened to us. Most of this leverage comes from internet distribution (freemium) and cloud computing (serverless), not AI. (Though we do use AI to answer support questions—since my cofounder is the only one handling them.) Now with AI, I argue that a solo engineer could outbuild a 100-member team in a couple of years. Given how much productivity has already increased, why is that an insane claim?

skmurphy 2y ago
How do you determine either what features to build or the next product to develop? I understand you are focused freemium as a goto market strategy with no dedicated sales or marketing team members. What tools are you displacing (e.g. Excel)?
- QueensGambit 2y ago
  > How do you determine what features to build or the next product to develop? My co-founder handles support, so he decides what to build next based on customer discussions. If a problem is big enough for a specific segment, we turn it into a separate product. > What tools are you displacing (e.g., Excel)? Most SMBs prefer to stay with Google Forms/Sheets rather than switching to a full-fledged CRM like HubSpot. But embedding Google Forms in their website affects their branding. We beautify and enhance Forms into a CRM, so they don’t have to migrate. I wrote about it here: https://manidoraisamy.com/developer-forever/post/can-you-use-google-forms-as-a-crm.anc-782c1657-2fff-40fd-9c91-d4b5b4eb90a4.html https://manidoraisamy.com/developer-forever/post/can-you-use...