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But does anyone have stories of the actual results or impact?
If the productivity gains are so huge, shouldn’t we see those engineers getting promoted super fast or getting rich from building a product extremely fast?
Where are those stories?
I use ChatGPT every day, to make myself more efficient (I get things done more quickly and with higher quality). Nobody really knows I use it.
The target for a great startup was 7% growth week-on-week, and now it's 10%. It means back then if you were making $1k/week in Jan 1, 2024, you'd expect to make $33k/week a year later. But thanks to AI, the standard is closer to $142k/week.
Back then, it was normal to raise $75k or so to build a prototype, now you can build a prototype in a couple of weekends. Back then, you would polish your pitch to get VC funding. Now you build, get the customers, then show what the customers are buying and why, and ask for funding to get 1000x the number of customers.
A lot of the risk factors have been removed. Building a legacy app no longer take multiple sync calls and weeks, they can be resolved in hours and maybe one sync call. Yes, I have a story of AI migrating a whole DB table when I asked it to move a button to another page. But it gets the tables right about 7 out of 10 times if you give it the right instructions. I dislike ORMs; they're practically a code smell. And AI works around that layer.
This is an entirely different question in itself, and isn't really related to AI, but more between productivity and corporations.
Corporations are a pipeline. You have a certain amount of input and a certain amount of output. There is a queue of input stuff. If that queue runs dry, then you have wasted productivity. The pipe manager is being negligent somewhere - either we can cut down on costs by removing the cogs in the machine, or someone further up the pipe isn't producing enough output to satisfy the inputs.
If FE has too much free time, then your options are: 1) pull FE into BE, 2) pull work from BE to FE, 3) get FE to do product stuff like A/B testing or talking to customers, 4) make more FE teams or even have one person in two teams, 5) turn the site into an app or the app into a site, 6) slow them down by making them return to office, 7) fire someone
A Chinese company might have a couple dudes dedicated to answering all questions on APIs and the systems. A Western company will simply not document things or overdocument it to the point that it's too obtuse to read and yet doesn't answer the question. The worst cases I've seen is developing a whole new programming language, which becomes a white elephant maintained by interns.
But the point is, there's mechanisms that kick in and slow down productivity so nobody needs to be laid off. There's also additional mechanisms like engineers being sick of working in 3 teams at once with no documentation, and so they leave.
I've seen no actual improvement in the development speed of our product. Same pace. Same endless discussions. Same meetings. It hasn't changed the pace nor it has lead to an explosion of ideas, implementations or discussions. It did lead to an increase in code and deployed microservices, though, but that is not really a good thing in itself.
It's like making a commitment to eat healthy, diversified food. And, as we did in the '90 in the post-communist country I'm living, we've let the doors wide open for all the food to enter. Junk or otherwise, without, from our part, any knowledge of what is healthy and what not. Tremendous amount of choices, little, close to zero knowledge about what is good and what is not.
At my work, we've been using AI since its beginnings. The company offers free subscriptions to every person, sw dev, qa, marketing, anyone. I'd say 9/10 people are using and writing code with it. I've seen no actual improvement in the development speed of our product. Same pace. Same endless discussions. Same meetings. It hasn't changed the pace nor it has lead to an explosion of ideas, implementations or discussions…
Teams are ranked by AI usage now, making me ask claude code how it slept every morning.
You better brace yourself, because as such a company we will run circles around you.
I need to get back to him and ask him why he isn‘t making more money than before…