1 employee doing the work of 3 is I think is a stretch
but 1 employee doing the work of 1.1 employees from a year ago I think is almost certainly true - at least, me and everyone i work with is _at least_ 10% more productive, and using AI extensively
In my 20 year career I’ve rarely been on a team with more than 3-5 people on a team or within region on a team.
So at that scale it’s not really reducing a team member on a given team still. But you get more productive which is notoriously hard to measure in SWE, so yeah. It’s possible that translates to iterating faster or closing tickets further down the backlog which is useful but not per-se staff reducing.
Maybe in mag7 where you have massive engineering orgs the 10% can impact a given team more..
and how many of them are totally wrong, or right about it!
[1] and how it might be changing with new generations of models
For all the hype about the 1X vs 10X distinction the real stumbling block is how many 0Xes there are out there and how frequently they tend to make it through hiring.
If you go by the measure of LoC per employee, then your number is probably even higher, somewhere between 10-20x per employee. The problem being, producing 10.000 lines of AI-slop per day is not a good productivity measure - all it does is create more technical debt and issues that now nobody is reviewing because a) people get fatigued and at some point just wave the AI-slop through b) there is not enough manpower because people got laid off because of "AI" c) People are generally feeling irritated by being asked to review and correct AI slop. There is a societal pushback brewing and it won't be nice for the so-called AI in the end. Think about the fact that most people who are exhilirated by the "AI" are either incompetent or incompetent and old. Most of the young folks, even those not in the technical domains, firmly reject AI. When did you ever hear of a revolutionary new tech that was actively hated on by the young people?
> Edit: I should be clear that I think #1 has been achieved for software development.
Maybe in the world of WP-plugins/typo3 and other simple work, though even those are fairly complex in their own ways which the retard-LLMs will trip on fair amount of times. Not if you are doing anything remotely complex. The retard-LLMs will still either put your secrets in plain text, suggest the laziest f*ing implementation of a problem etc. It's just a shitshow nowadays, compounded by the LLM companies trying to keep the costs low (and therefore keep the "users" hooked), which they currently accomplish by shortchanging you and dumbing the LLMs down - because otherwise they'd have to charge for true cost - upwards of tens of thousands of dollars per seat - which would render their initial value proposition completely useless. Something has to give.
This was a reasonable position to hold 9 months ago but it’s absurd now. I’m not going to convince you - but you really should give it a try.
That's cute, I hope you enjoy that high, it's really impressive at first - fyi -I've been using GH Copilot since early days (invited to early access) AND paying it for my entire company ever since MS published the first commercial plan. All the way to the latest entshittification drama with Opus 4.6 being pulled away and Opus 4.7 taxed at 7.5x rate. Yeah, its great for quick tryouts or similar. But using it in wider scope, with complex reqs and dynamic environment? Complete shitshow.
> This was a reasonable position to hold 9 months ago
Browse my comment history. There were people just like you, 6, 9 or 12 months ago telling me exactly the same. Some also threatening that I would "be the first to go away". Like I said, cute actually :) You know in January Dario Amodei announced again, AI would write ALL code in 6 months. Do you see it happening?