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Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?
221–230 of 244 posts
Re: Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?
#222Why not both?
That's the challenge with these posts. Always a false dichotomy.
Re: Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?
#223Having managed mobile teams, the framing to fire devs or build better misses the point The teams I've seen succeed with AI are the ones where engineering practices are already strong. AI just amplifies your culture, for the good or the bad.
If you already have a solid code review and clear architecture standards, AI will accelerate that. If your team ships spaghetti and hopes for the best with "LGTM" PR reviews, the spaghetti will just grow.
The 2025 DORA report basically confirmed this.
Re: Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?
#224We went through this exact decision point 18 months ago. But we chose to keep the team. Redirected them. Our threat detection pipeline, which would've taken 8 months to build - surprisingly and luckily shipped in 11 weeks. That's not a productivity stat, that's a product moat. The companies gutting engineering right now are going to realise too late that AI amplifies what you already have. If you fire the people with…
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Re: Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?
#225> try it, you might actually be amazed. I keep being told this and the tools keep falling at the first hurdle. This morning I asked Claude to use a library to load a toml file in .net and print a value. It immediately explained how it was an easy file format to parse and didn’t need a library. I undid, went back to plan mode and it picked a library, added it and claimed it was done. Except the code didn’t compile. Th…
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Re: Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see a lot of people talk about 'insecure code' and while I don't doubt that's true, there's a lot of software development where security isn't actually a concern because there's no need for the software to be 'secure'. Maintainability is important I'll grant you.
Oh, finally someone who speaks the truth :D yeah, security su*ks everywhere. True. But when you grow a product with time, you fill the holes one by one when you start losing water. With AI, you will have so many holes in your 15 days made battleship, that... good luck putting it at sea, you can tank in the first minute. As Moltbook has shown. I don't have to find proofs (which I dont actually find). I just need a cou…
For sure, but I haven't written a single piece of software where security would ever be considered a factor. Not all software runs on the web, not all software deals with accounts etc.
Re: Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?
#227I build products that are 90% quality but 10x faster
Re: Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?
#228build better products 100%
Re: Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?
#229I think most public companies will take the short term profits and startups will be given a huge opportunity to take market share as a result. At my company, we are maintaining our hiring plan (I'm the decision maker). We have never been more excited at our permission to win against the incumbents in our market. At the same time, I've never been more concerned about other startups giving us a real run. I think we wil…
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Re: Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?
#230the framing is wrong. it's not fire vs build — it's: can you ship things that weren't economically viable before? AI drops the cost of building software. that means more software gets built, not less devs needed. the bottleneck was never typing speed — it was the gap between idea and working product.