5 ms·

If it were 2018, I personally would have made 3 SWE hires in the last 12 months. The reason I didn't need to is because of LLMs. Not budget, not anything else.

If it were 2018, I personally would have made 3 SWE hires in the last 12 months. The reason I didn't need to is because of LLMs. Not budget, not anything else. I don't think AI is so much to blame for layoffs, but I do think it is a huge component of the slow hiring. There's just less demand for coders.

napierzaza 11mo ago
[dead]
badmonkey0001 11mo ago
It feels to me like everyone is holding their breath to see how the wholesale "AI can replace people" notion pans out. Whether it proves true or not, betting on the wrong result will hit hard so few want to go all in (outside of the companies that produce the tech itself). If there's anything "AI" has been able to ship at scale, it's uncertainty.
- Ferret7446 11mo ago
  AI is absolutely already replacing people. No idea if it will replace everyone, but that doesn't really matter, does it?
Esophagus4 11mo ago
Is it that LLMs are making your devs that much more efficient?
- ponector 11mo ago
  From my experience devs are much faster with LLM if you measure speed in merge requests. However, in 2025 they are producing x4 more bugs comparing to 2024. The same developers, the same codebase but now with Cursor.
  - imiric 11mo ago
    Move fast and break things, amirite?
actsasbuffoon 11mo ago
I was the first dev at my current company to experiment with Claude Code back when it first came out. Some of my coworkers tried it, and some didn’t like it at all. But now literally all of us are using it. The company gives us a $100 monthly stipend for it. We’re a small dev team, but our CEO is thrilled. He keeps bragging about how customers are gobsmacked by how quickly we’re delivering new features and he’s been asked if we’ve made a ton of hires in the last year. We’re actually down two developers from when I started. I don’t love the code it writes, but the speed is unbeatable. We still need devs, and I don’t think that’s ever going to change. But we don’t need as many devs. We’re shipping like crazy with a small team. I don’t think more people would speed us up much at all.
- GenerWork 11mo ago
  This is what I'm seeing in the design market. With Figma Make, you can write a prompt, tell it to use your design library, generate a flow, and then hand it off to developers and say "Hey, look at this, can you implement this?". Alternatively, you can use Cursor/Claude Code/Codex to pull in Figma design system elements via MCP, and generate flows that way. You can push features so much faster with the same or fewer people, and lets be honest, pushing more features in less time is the #1 metric at a lot of companies even if they claim otherwise.
  - xnx 11mo ago
    Why use Figma at all instead of going from prompt to code?
    - aeonfox 11mo ago
      Presumably you can iterate on and manually tweak the design first, which is much quicker and less cumbersome than iterating on and tweaking the design when it's in clunky HTML/CSS/JS form and all the non-vector graphical assets are flattened/cropped etc.
      - xnx 11mo ago
lubujackson 11mo ago
My take is that AI adoption is a gear shift to a higher level abstraction, not a replacement. So we will have a lull, then a return to hiring for situations just like this. Maybe there is a lot more runway for AI to take jerbs, but I think it will hit an equilibrium of "creating different jobs" at some point.
rich_sasha 11mo ago
It's almost worse than this, in that IME LLMs also made junior devs worse. They want to use LLMs, and why not, it's the tech du jour, but then they lack the judgment to produce good LLM code. So as LLMs are getting better, junior devs aregetting worse.

napierzaza 11mo ago

[dead]

badmonkey0001 11mo ago

It feels to me like everyone is holding their breath to see how the wholesale "AI can replace people" notion pans out. Whether it proves true or not, betting on the wrong result will hit hard so few want to go all in (outside of the companies that produce the tech itself). If there's anything "AI" has been able to ship at scale, it's uncertainty.

Ferret7446 11mo ago
AI is absolutely already replacing people. No idea if it will replace everyone, but that doesn't really matter, does it?

Esophagus4 11mo ago

Is it that LLMs are making your devs that much more efficient?

ponector 11mo ago
From my experience devs are much faster with LLM if you measure speed in merge requests. However, in 2025 they are producing x4 more bugs comparing to 2024. The same developers, the same codebase but now with Cursor.
- imiric 11mo ago
  Move fast and break things, amirite?

actsasbuffoon 11mo ago

I was the first dev at my current company to experiment with Claude Code back when it first came out. Some of my coworkers tried it, and some didn’t like it at all. But now literally all of us are using it. The company gives us a $100 monthly stipend for it. We’re a small dev team, but our CEO is thrilled. He keeps bragging about how customers are gobsmacked by how quickly we’re delivering new features and he’s been asked if we’ve made a ton of hires in the last year. We’re actually down two developers from when I started. I don’t love the code it writes, but the speed is unbeatable. We still need devs, and I don’t think that’s ever going to change. But we don’t need as many devs. We’re shipping like crazy with a small team. I don’t think more people would speed us up much at all.

GenerWork 11mo ago
This is what I'm seeing in the design market. With Figma Make, you can write a prompt, tell it to use your design library, generate a flow, and then hand it off to developers and say "Hey, look at this, can you implement this?". Alternatively, you can use Cursor/Claude Code/Codex to pull in Figma design system elements via MCP, and generate flows that way. You can push features so much faster with the same or fewer people, and lets be honest, pushing more features in less time is the #1 metric at a lot of companies even if they claim otherwise.
- xnx 11mo ago
  Why use Figma at all instead of going from prompt to code?
  - aeonfox 11mo ago
    Presumably you can iterate on and manually tweak the design first, which is much quicker and less cumbersome than iterating on and tweaking the design when it's in clunky HTML/CSS/JS form and all the non-vector graphical assets are flattened/cropped etc.
    - xnx 11mo ago

lubujackson 11mo ago

My take is that AI adoption is a gear shift to a higher level abstraction, not a replacement. So we will have a lull, then a return to hiring for situations just like this. Maybe there is a lot more runway for AI to take jerbs, but I think it will hit an equilibrium of "creating different jobs" at some point.

rich_sasha 11mo ago

It's almost worse than this, in that IME LLMs also made junior devs worse. They want to use LLMs, and why not, it's the tech du jour, but then they lack the judgment to produce good LLM code. So as LLMs are getting better, junior devs aregetting worse.