Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?

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AI tooling does not provide productivity gains unless you consider it productive to skip the boilerplate portion of software development, which you can already do by using a framework, or you never plan to get past the MVP stage of a product, as refactoring the AI spaghetti would take several magnitudes more work than doing it with humans from the beginning.

Amazon has demonstrated that it takes just as longer, or longer, to have senior devs review LLM output than it would to just have the senior devs do the programming in the first place. But now your senior devs are wasted on reviewing instead of developing or engineering. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, and Palantir have all suffered multiple losses in the tens of millions (or more) due to AI output issues. Now that Microsoft has finally realized how bad LLMs really are at generating useful output, they've begun removing AI functionality from Windows.

Product quality matters more than time to market. Especially in tech, the first-to-market is almost never the company that dominates, so it's truly bizarre that VCs are always so focused on their investments trying to be first to market instead of best to market.

If Competitor Y just fired 90% of their developers, I would have a toast with my entire human team. And a few months later, we'd own the market with our superior product.

And for a lot of AI transformation tasks, for a long time I've been using even clever regex search/replace, and with a few minutes of small adjustment afterward I have a 100% deterministic (or 95% deterministic and 5% manually human reviewed and edited) process for transforming code. Although of course I haven't tried that cross-language, etc.

And of course, we didn't see a massive layoff after the introduction of say, StackOverflow, or DreamWeaver, or jQuery vs raw JS, Twitter Bootstrap, etc.

Assuming you are primarily selling software.

Situation a/ llm increase developer's productivity: you hire more developers as you cash profit. If you don't your competitor will.

b/ llm doesn't increase productivity, you keep cruising. You rejoice seeing some competitors lay off.

Reality shows dissonance with these only possible scenarios. Absurd decision making, a mistake? No mistake. Many tech companies are facing difficulties, they need to lose weight to remain profitable, and appease the shareholders demand for bigger margins.

How to do this without a backlash? Ai is replacing developers, Anthropic's CEO said engineers don't write code anymore, role obsolete in 6 months. It naturally makes sense we have to let some of them go. If the prophecy doesn't turn true, nobody ever get fired for buying IBM.

The companies quietly doing the firing will say they're doing the building. The answer you get depends entirely on who you ask and what they're trying to justify.