301–310 of 412 posts
Agency work is now done with even smaller teams than a decade ago, thanks to the adoption of SaaS, iPaaS, serverless as main delivery technologies.
AI empowers to do even more with even less people, however there isn't enough project demand to keep everyone busy.
I open this discussion thread and literally the first two top-level comments I see contradict each other: > I find that productivity follows a Pareto distribution (80:20 rule) and that AI is a sharper tool in that it enables the already productive to be proportionally more productive and this effect increases as the intelligence of AI increases. So 80:20 becomes a 90:10, 95:5, 99:1 etc. > Big caveat to the productivi…
While I disagree with the counter position I do believe it to be an honest account of their experience. I think the counter intuitive aspect is that marginal cost of software is practically zero so in an efficient market the consumption of it will be dominated by the best software written by senior devs with AI, even if the production of software is dominated by junior devs with AI. I think we are in a transitory pha…
Most ways of measuring productivity across an economy (in macro sense) takes into account only the transfer of capital. Meaning someone paying for something. So in this case it will be measurably zeo in most macro-economics studies.
Employees have no incentive to meaningfully implement AI to increase productivity, and if they do so, they have no reason to share it. If AI means job cuts and not using AI means job cuts but no one really tracks AI impact that means performative adoption of AI is safest, and real gains are to be sandbagged as innate magic hand waving. At my work I'm one of the few who says "I made this with Claude" and the near impo…
This was observed on first week for me. In the employee room, most people were all crazy about LLMs, looking at the prompt results in awe, "I can do my day in 1h easy..." . By the end of the week, group meetings were much more tame "yeah I can go a bit deeper than I would otherwise, surely saves me a few hours a week". And after the meeting was over these employees were already saying that they would never report the…
What we should fear is the startups.
Legal startup demonstrates they can do legal work at a fraction of the price. New generation of banks can underwrite at a fraction of the cost, or new insurance companies can insure much cheaper.
This will force the incumbents to reduce head count and use Ai.
AI is only replacing low-level work. It will eventually move on to high-level work. One missing point: careers that require communication, especially person-to-person, won't be replaced by AI. Why? Because people don't like to speak with AI when they have a hard pain point to solve. It's not about intelligence; it's about trust and relationships that AI cannot replace.
A crucial point is that the amount of these careers might reduce dues to structural changes of the job market.
Just: yes, SaaS companies can do their work faster and can downsize. But a sizable portion of SaaS companies get to downsize entirely as their entire purpose is disrupted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's so evident, why can't someone prove it with something more than "it seems better and everyone agrees"?
Have you ever seen evidence of a productivity improvement that you have found convincing for any software tool , independent of LLMs? What shape did that evidence take?
The key thing is that it's easy to contrast the old way vs the new way and the evidence become obvious.
The thing with LLM tooling is that they're not reliable. I can do fine with risks, but only when there's a way to manage it so that if the disaster happens, it's practically a black swan event.
Typing more code or solving one task has never been the core problem. The core problem has always been to encode a whole system into the computer AND then provide a control interface for it. It requires both an understanding of the system you want to encode (especially how it behaves over time) and empathy to know what would be the best control interface for the users.
That understanding does not rely on the amount of code, and the best control is found through communication.
If we take the following project that you did:
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/17/vibe-scraping/
An understanding of the system could be the following: A conference schedule consisting of events (time, place, speaker, description,...) stored or presented in some format. The interface would be: A web app with a mobile first UI that presents the information in an accessible manner (highlighting, filtering, exports,...).
A relatively quick (I haven't tested it), would have been to open the web inspector and extract the data using the dom API (requires knowledge of the dom api and a desktop browser), put the data into some json or a tsv file, then write a php script or a python script and then serve that. The interface could have been built with the standard elements of some css framework (bulma?).
Not saying the above is better. But the thing is that is doable from even a raspberry pi. And more it's repeatable and extensible. And the individual piece of knowledge are reusable in different situation.
I am just having a hard time with all this AI stuff. The other day I got some feedback on one of the products I own. It was a small tweak to an anchor tag to add a title and change the color for just that element. I made the change in the web inspector, showed it to the user, they said yeah that’s good. I walked over to one of my engineers and asked “can you make this change and get it in dev, I just pinged it to you…
This is exactly the time to re organize. Not necessarily lay off, but some people might be asked to do other things or made redundant.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I disagree with the counter position I do believe it to be an honest account of their experience. I think the counter intuitive aspect is that marginal cost of software is practically zero so in an efficient market the consumption of it will be dominated by the best software written by senior devs with AI, even if the production of software is dominated by junior devs with AI. I think we are in a transitory pha…
> If junior devs are productively producing software that then goes unused then how productive were they really Most ways of measuring productivity across an economy (in macro sense) takes into account only the transfer of capital. Meaning someone paying for something. So in this case it will be measurably zeo in most macro-economics studies.
They say the internet is for porn but it’s really to sell/buy stuff
Edit: even with LLMs the “killer” application is to make it easier to buy things xD
The biggest impact of AI at my job are LLM code generators for software engineers. That's only scratching the surface of what AI can do for enterprises. My company doesn't yet have the orientation, inclination or technical expertise to unlock the true power of AI for our business goals. We're stuck buying packaged solutions from third parties and aren't integrating layers of intelligence in our environment. I doubt w…
But AI is becoming much more pervasive than websites. And the level of friction isn't as high as you might think, because people are already constantly on phones. It's only a matter of time before MS Copilot gets so good that even the least tech-savvy people start asking AI to do their work. That same HVAC service owner can tell AI "there's a big emergency at Bob's Burgers in Brentwood, get 2 of my guys there ASAP. We can reschedule a visit if needed".
These are not trillion token operations either. It will be affordable to do this. And generic office commands like "schedule this", "contact X about Y" are 3-5 years away from being super usable. And that's mainly because there's a lot of gruntwork for enabling agents to access the right data.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is not the most absurd, the most absurd is people here thinking faster ( and yes I avoid the word better ) code generator engines will solve humanity problems.
But software makes the most money? Look at the stock market. It must be the most important thing? right guys? right?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems to be true this time though; I have observed it myself and heard it from several experienced developers I personally know and respect. It feels like some threshold was crossed with Opus 4.5 and Gpt 5.3, where the models are now able to reliably solve certain classes of problems that were previously unreliable. Time will tell of course, and it’s early, but inflection points do exist with progress.
Thing is. You can find an extremely similar paragraph written about Claude 4.x or some equivalent gpt. And simultaneously, many people expressing their frustration and the shortcomings of “But it’s different this time” - several people, several times over the last couple of years. This is not at all a dig at you, I’m very sorry if it reads that way. My point is these things only get truly better in anecdotes. The way…
Yes, as a product gradually improves there will always be many people for whom version X didn't work well for them and version X+1 does. It turns out that Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.1 were larger than average improvements that cross that threshold for a significant number of people.
My point is these things only get truly better in anecdotes. The ways in which they fail is yet to change.
If your claim is that there's no substantive difference between Sonnet 3.5 and Fable, then we live in very different worlds.