4 ms·

Perhaps. Could the same be said for engineers?

amelius 9mo ago
Yes. But they are now called managers.
ap99 9mo ago
Yes and no. Five engineers could be turned into maybe two, but probably not less. It's the 'bus factor' at play. If you still want human approvals on pull requests then If one of those engineers goes on vacation or leaves the company you're stuck with one engineer for a while. If both leave then you're screwed. If you're a small startup, then sure there are no rules and it's the wild west. One dev can run the world.
- marginalia_nu 9mo ago
  This was true even before LLMs. Development has always scaled very poorly with team size. A team of 20 heads is like at most twice as productive as a team of 5, and a team of 5 is marginally more productive than a team of 3. Peak productivity has always been somewhere between 1-3 people, though if any one of those people can't or won't continue working for one reason or another, it's generally game over for the project. So you hire more. This is why small software startups time and time again manage to run circles around with organizations with much larger budgets. A 10 person game studio like Team Cherry can release smash hit after smash hit, while Ubisoft with 170,000% the personnel count visibly flounders. Imagine doing that in hardware, like if you could just grab some buddies and start a business successfully competing with TSMC out of your garage. That's clearly not possible. But in software, it actually is.
aurareturn 9mo ago
Yes. That could be said for engineers as well. If the business can no longer justify 5 engineers, then they might only have 1. I've always said that we won't need fewer software developers with AI. It's just that each company will require fewer developers but there will be more companies. IE: 2022: 100 companies employ 10,000 engineers 2026: 1000 companies employ 10,000 engineers The net result is the same for emplyoment. But because AI makes it that much more efficient, many businesses that weren't financially viable when it needed 100 engineers might become viable with 10 engineers + AI.
- SturgeonsLaw 9mo ago
  There's another scenario... 100 companies employ 1000 engineers
  - gjm11 9mo ago
    The person you're replying to is obviously and explicitly aware that that is another scenario, and the whole point of their comment was to argue against it and explain why they think something else is more likely. Merely restating the thing they were already arguing against adds nothing to the discussion.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
  - aurareturn 9mo ago
    Why do you think this outcome is more likely?
    - oldjim798 9mo ago
      Because this is what capital has told us. Capital always wants to reduce the labour cost to $0.
      - aurareturn 9mo ago
        If labor cost is close to $0, even more businesses that weren’t viable before would become viable. Do you not see the logic?
        squeefers 9mo ago
        ai is bad because it's automated his job. luddites in tech. a real contradiction
        9mo ago
matwood 9mo ago
That assumes your backlog is finite. Is the tech writers backlog also seemingly infinite like every tech backlog I've ever seen?
- DeborahWrites 9mo ago
  Yes. Yes it is.
- imtringued 9mo ago
  The tech writer backlog is probably worse, because writing good documentation requires extensive experience with the software you're writing documentation about and there are four types of documentation you need to produce.
raincole 9mo ago
We have been seeing this happen in real time in the past two years, no?
ekidd 9mo ago
Yes. I have been building software and acting as tech lead for close to 30 years. I am not even quite sure I know how to manage a team of more than two programmers right now. Opus 4.5, in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing, can develop software almost as fast as I can write specs and review code. And it's just plain better at writing code than 60% of my graduating class was back in the day. I have banned at least one person from ever writing a commit message or pull request again, because Claude will explain it better. Now, most people don't know to squeeze that much productivity out of it, most corporate procurement would take 9 months to buy a bucket if it was raining money outside, and it's possible to turn your code into unmaintainable slop at warp speed. And Claude is better at writing code than it is at almost anything else, so the rest of y'all are safe for a while. But if you think that tech writers, or translators, or software developers are the only people who are going to get hit by waves of downsizing, then you're not paying attention. Even if the underlying AI tech stalls out hard and permanently in 2026, there's a wave of change coming, and we are not ready. Nothing in our society, economy or politics is ready to deal with what's coming. And that scares me a bit these days.
- aniou 9mo ago
  "And it's just plain better at writing code than 60% of my graduating class was back in the day". Only because it has access to vast amount of sample code to draw a re-combine parts. Did You ever considered emerging technologies, like new languages or frameworks that may be a much better suited for You area but they are new, thus there is no codebase for LLM to draw from? I'm starting to think about a risk of technological stagnation in many areas.
  - jason_oster 9mo ago
    > Did You ever considered emerging technologies, like new languages or frameworks that may be a much better suited for You area but they are new, thus there is no codebase for LLM to draw from? Try it. The pattern matching these things do is unlike anything seen before. I'm writing a compiler for a language I designed, and LLMs have no trouble writing examples and tests. This is a language with syntax and semantics that does not exist in any training set because I made it up. And here it is, a machine is reading and writing code in this language with little difficulty. Caveat emptor: it is far from perfect. But so are humans, which is where the training set originated. > I'm starting to think about a risk of technological stagnation in many areas. That just does not follow for me. We're in an era where advancements in technology continues to be roughly quadratic [1]. The implication you're giving is that the advancements are a step function that will soon (or has already) hit its final step. This suggests that you are unfamiliar or unappreciative of how anything progresses, in any domain. Creativity is a function of taking what existed before and making it your own. "Standing on the shoulders of giants", "pulling oneself up by the bootstraps", and all that. None of that is changing just because some parts of it can now be automated. Stagnation is the very last thing I would bet on. In part because it means a "full reset" and loss of everything, like most apocalyptic story lines. And in part because I choose to remain cautiously optimistic. [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/technology-long-run https://ourworldindata.org/technology-long-run

Yes. But they are now called managers.

ap99 9mo ago

Yes and no. Five engineers could be turned into maybe two, but probably not less. It's the 'bus factor' at play. If you still want human approvals on pull requests then If one of those engineers goes on vacation or leaves the company you're stuck with one engineer for a while. If both leave then you're screwed. If you're a small startup, then sure there are no rules and it's the wild west. One dev can run the world.

marginalia_nu 9mo ago
This was true even before LLMs. Development has always scaled very poorly with team size. A team of 20 heads is like at most twice as productive as a team of 5, and a team of 5 is marginally more productive than a team of 3. Peak productivity has always been somewhere between 1-3 people, though if any one of those people can't or won't continue working for one reason or another, it's generally game over for the project. So you hire more. This is why small software startups time and time again manage to run circles around with organizations with much larger budgets. A 10 person game studio like Team Cherry can release smash hit after smash hit, while Ubisoft with 170,000% the personnel count visibly flounders. Imagine doing that in hardware, like if you could just grab some buddies and start a business successfully competing with TSMC out of your garage. That's clearly not possible. But in software, it actually is.

aurareturn 9mo ago

Yes. That could be said for engineers as well. If the business can no longer justify 5 engineers, then they might only have 1. I've always said that we won't need fewer software developers with AI. It's just that each company will require fewer developers but there will be more companies. IE: 2022: 100 companies employ 10,000 engineers 2026: 1000 companies employ 10,000 engineers The net result is the same for emplyoment. But because AI makes it that much more efficient, many businesses that weren't financially viable when it needed 100 engineers might become viable with 10 engineers + AI.

SturgeonsLaw 9mo ago
There's another scenario... 100 companies employ 1000 engineers
- gjm11 9mo ago
  The person you're replying to is obviously and explicitly aware that that is another scenario, and the whole point of their comment was to argue against it and explain why they think something else is more likely. Merely restating the thing they were already arguing against adds nothing to the discussion.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
- aurareturn 9mo ago
  Why do you think this outcome is more likely?
  - oldjim798 9mo ago
    Because this is what capital has told us. Capital always wants to reduce the labour cost to $0.
    - aurareturn 9mo ago
      If labor cost is close to $0, even more businesses that weren’t viable before would become viable. Do you not see the logic?
      - squeefers 9mo ago
        ai is bad because it's automated his job. luddites in tech. a real contradiction
        9mo ago

matwood 9mo ago

That assumes your backlog is finite. Is the tech writers backlog also seemingly infinite like every tech backlog I've ever seen?

DeborahWrites 9mo ago
Yes. Yes it is.
imtringued 9mo ago
The tech writer backlog is probably worse, because writing good documentation requires extensive experience with the software you're writing documentation about and there are four types of documentation you need to produce.

raincole 9mo ago

We have been seeing this happen in real time in the past two years, no?

ekidd 9mo ago

Yes. I have been building software and acting as tech lead for close to 30 years. I am not even quite sure I know how to manage a team of more than two programmers right now. Opus 4.5, in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing, can develop software almost as fast as I can write specs and review code. And it's just plain better at writing code than 60% of my graduating class was back in the day. I have banned at least one person from ever writing a commit message or pull request again, because Claude will explain it better. Now, most people don't know to squeeze that much productivity out of it, most corporate procurement would take 9 months to buy a bucket if it was raining money outside, and it's possible to turn your code into unmaintainable slop at warp speed. And Claude is better at writing code than it is at almost anything else, so the rest of y'all are safe for a while. But if you think that tech writers, or translators, or software developers are the only people who are going to get hit by waves of downsizing, then you're not paying attention. Even if the underlying AI tech stalls out hard and permanently in 2026, there's a wave of change coming, and we are not ready. Nothing in our society, economy or politics is ready to deal with what's coming. And that scares me a bit these days.

aniou 9mo ago
"And it's just plain better at writing code than 60% of my graduating class was back in the day". Only because it has access to vast amount of sample code to draw a re-combine parts. Did You ever considered emerging technologies, like new languages or frameworks that may be a much better suited for You area but they are new, thus there is no codebase for LLM to draw from? I'm starting to think about a risk of technological stagnation in many areas.
- jason_oster 9mo ago
  > Did You ever considered emerging technologies, like new languages or frameworks that may be a much better suited for You area but they are new, thus there is no codebase for LLM to draw from? Try it. The pattern matching these things do is unlike anything seen before. I'm writing a compiler for a language I designed, and LLMs have no trouble writing examples and tests. This is a language with syntax and semantics that does not exist in any training set because I made it up. And here it is, a machine is reading and writing code in this language with little difficulty. Caveat emptor: it is far from perfect. But so are humans, which is where the training set originated. > I'm starting to think about a risk of technological stagnation in many areas. That just does not follow for me. We're in an era where advancements in technology continues to be roughly quadratic [1]. The implication you're giving is that the advancements are a step function that will soon (or has already) hit its final step. This suggests that you are unfamiliar or unappreciative of how anything progresses, in any domain. Creativity is a function of taking what existed before and making it your own. "Standing on the shoulders of giants", "pulling oneself up by the bootstraps", and all that. None of that is changing just because some parts of it can now be automated. Stagnation is the very last thing I would bet on. In part because it means a "full reset" and loss of everything, like most apocalyptic story lines. And in part because I choose to remain cautiously optimistic. [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/technology-long-run https://ourworldindata.org/technology-long-run