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People want to build something with the newfound productivity, but it turns out that software development always had a high leverage against potential impact -
by exitb 6mo ago
People want to build something with the newfound productivity, but it turns out that software development always had a high leverage against potential impact - coding was always relatively cheap. That means there is in fact no backlog of great products that could have been built if we only had 10x productivity. The only spots where "missing products" can be found are mostly around AI itself.
- anonfunction 6mo agoI'll take a counterpoint, coding has historically not been cheap. Software engineers have been one of the highest paid professions for a long time. Personally while working a full time job, raising a family and trying to have some semblance of a social life my open source contributions fell off a cliff until recently with the popularization of coding agents. I've created more projects and software in the last 12 months than the past 10 years combined. Not to say a lot of it wasn't total slop or provided little utility, but it's been a fun and exciting time. Another interesting point is that until recently most average people thought "code" was out of reach or they didn't have time / energy to learn it. My mother made a webapp with the help of claude code the other day to generate books, which she thought of and completed in the course of 3 days all the while learning about terminals, localhost, ports, APIs and more.