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Ask HN: Where are the AI-driven profits or promotions?

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Re: Ask HN: Where are the AI-driven profits or promotions?

#21

Post by ivape »

molteanu wrote: post #12
ivape wrote: post #5

GPT 3.5 was only released in late 2022. It really hasn’t even been a full three years. We’re still discovering what we even want to do with this stuff. Shocking when you say it out loud, it hasn’t even been three years . Let the kid grow up a bit.

Even more reason to ask the question, then. Not even three years but we know it leads to x% productivity increases, happy teams, etc, etc. We know the buzzwords. If a new, wonder drug or food or medicinal plant would appear on the radar with claims of "it increases your life expectancy by x years, your happiness and well-being by y amounts, etc, etc" would you say that those claims are based on fact or are just marke…

Personally? I find the damn thing to be magical. Truly. I can’t stop being amazed by it, so you’ll have to ask someone less head over heels with it.

But I’ll grant you this, having said the above, I have no way of actually objectively proving love.

Re: Ask HN: Where are the AI-driven profits or promotions?

#22

Post by i_have_an_idea »

Most recently, AI helped me salvage and refactor a giant and completely mismanaged outsourced rewrite of a popular niche site.

Without it, the site would suffer a slow and painful death in the SERPs and would lead to about 10MM annual loss for the company.

Starting from scratch with a proper, qualified team was not possible for political reasons.

So, being able to do it as a single person, with heavy AI assistance, is a huge win.

Re: Ask HN: Where are the AI-driven profits or promotions?

#23

Post by alternatex »

i_have_an_idea wrote: post #22

Most recently, AI helped me salvage and refactor a giant and completely mismanaged outsourced rewrite of a popular niche site. Without it, the site would suffer a slow and painful death in the SERPs and would lead to about 10MM annual loss for the company. Starting from scratch with a proper, qualified team was not possible for political reasons. So, being able to do it as a single person, with heavy AI assistance, i…

I wonder how a single handed savings of 10 mil might get rewarded in a company. Was there at least a pizza party?

Where I work there probably wouldn't even be a promotion on the line, not in the same year at least.

Re: Ask HN: Where are the AI-driven profits or promotions?

#24

Post by gavinray » 

  > But does anyone have stories of the actual results or impact?
I'll be intentionally vague here, but there are companies which are attempting to identify members whose output is quantifiably improved and retain + compensate them at increased rates.

Will this work at every org? Probably not. Will it work for some? It seems reasonable to me, though we can't plot the long-tail of these sorts of efforts yet, I think.

Re: Ask HN: Where are the AI-driven profits or promotions?

#25

Post by gavinray »

molteanu wrote: post #8

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…

I have the opposite experience.

Company offered Copilot subscriptions org-wide early, as well as Augment, and Slack integration for LLM's with internal docs and discussion contexts.

Copilot has been useful (I was part of the early access and used it +1 year prior to public launch, though) but I think Augment has really seen the biggest impact in our org.

Several small features and a lot of refactors have been done entirely through Augment.

Personally, I'm a bigger fan of Claude Code, but it's not covered by our org so I only get my $20/mo use out of it.

Re: Ask HN: Where are the AI-driven profits or promotions?

#26

Post by saltwatercowboy »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #9
molteanu wrote: post #8

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…

We are currently in the „AI experimentation phase“, by 2026, latest, we will be a first class AI first company -the CPTO said so. 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.

This reads like a threat penned by a supervillain's incompetent son-in-law.

Re: Ask HN: Where are the AI-driven profits or promotions?

#29

Post by blamestross »

molteanu wrote: post #8

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…

Its almost like the bottleneck of software engineering "at scale" is human communication not "programming speed"

Re: Ask HN: Where are the AI-driven profits or promotions?

#30

Post by muzani »

dwroberts wrote: post #17
muzani wrote: post #6

There's plenty of stories like this: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/15/y-combinator-startups-are-fa... 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…

The linked story is “YC says YC companies growing faster because of AI” The story doesn’t state much about source but is it literally just an editorialised press release?

Here's an exact source: https://www.vanta.com/resources/why-the-next-unicorns-are-bu...

I'm leaving that utm_source in the link for irony, lol. Couldn't find it from the first page of Google, but AI found it in seconds.

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