upvote

points

by timacles18 hours ago |
comments
upvoteby ashdksnndck17 hours ago|
next
[-]
Companies whose main core competency is writing code were already making up a big chunk of the economy before AI. Also, less wealthy companies were constrained in their use of software by the inability to afford the salaries of talented programmers (and ripoff practices from software consulting companies who in theory could help). Lowering the cost of building software systems ought to unblock a good amount of economic activity as the technology diffuses.
reply
upvoteby bunderbunder15 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
Those companies are certainly writing more code. But It isn’t clear that they are increasing their economic productivity. It could even conceivably have the opposite effect by fueling a race to the bottom.

e.g. an interesting possible canary in this coal mine is that there’s been a 200% increase in the rate of new apps appearing on Apple’s App Store, but it has not been accompanied by a 200% increase in the rate at which people are buying apps.

reply
upvoteby andwur14 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
The AI pundits often seem to apply the logic that code output is directly proportional to revenue and/or profit, and as such it follows that an AI usage increase leads to more code which leads to more revenue.

I don't believe this aligns with the reality of any major company, unless your business is in the literal sense "selling code" your revenue and profit is tangential to the quantity of code you produce. Google is a good example of this: most of their revenue and profit comes from their ad network, which is disconnected from their development productivity and instead heavily reliant on network effects and time in market. If I was a new competitor with infinite AI funds to throw at whatever problem I choose, I can't simply capture their market by developing an exact copy of Google's ad platform. In the same way, Google can't substantially grow their ad network by coding "more" or "better", they still need more customers and consumers to interact with their network to see any increase in revenue.

So it doesn't directly follow that a productivity increase will inherently follow an AI usage increase.

reply
upvoteby timacles5 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
next
[-]
I would go as far as to say writing more Code has almost no impact on their economic productivity. What drives those companies is infrastructure and networks
reply
upvoteby nobleach4 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
So far the place where I've seen "more code being written" having a postive effect, has been in paying down tech debt and reduction of overhead. We've rewritten services (bringing multiple microservices back under moduliths) and cut costs. But I'm talking about net-negative code. That's not the point you're making. I agree that puking out 20 new features likely wouldn't gain us more revenue.
reply
upvoteby therealdrag014 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
That’s great for consumers.
reply
upvoteby lelanthran13 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
A lower signal/noise ratio is never better for consumers.
reply
upvoteby bryanrasmussen14 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
next
[-]
If the quality of all apps remains high, but if there is an increase of low quality apps it may not necessarily be great for consumers as it becomes difficult to distinguish which are the good and bad quality apps, making it risky to purchase apps.
reply
upvoteby bandrami13 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
Not necessarily. European grocery shoppers report higher satisfaction with the shopping experience than American grocery shoppers do.
reply
upvoteby timacles5 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
next
[-]
You are wrong, sir. Their core competency is building out infrastructure and networks to support their software and user base. software is by far the least complicated thing they do.

what makes YouTube YouTube is not the video player it’s the servers that can handle petabytes of uploads a day and billions of views. YouTube software wise, is no different from the 100s of porn websites that are coded by small European teams

reply
upvoteby samat8 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
next
[-]
I am yet to see that ‘companies with great ideas which simply cannot afford those very expensive developers’. For the most, issue is not programmer costs. Mostly it’s inability to formulate the MVP which makes sense.

‘uber for my industry’ is not a sensible business strategy

Honestly, if you know guys whose bottleneck is pure software dev — please let me know, I have a good, experienced team in Eastern Europe, we can do wonders in product development. But coming up with sensible business ideas and executing on them in the real world is crazy hard and extremely rare.

reply
upvoteby IsTom12 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
If we talking about Meta, Google, etc. code is only incidental to them earning money.
reply
upvoteby lesostep11 hours ago|
prev|
next
[-]
But what if it kills current ad-tech as we know it (paying to show ads on random sites without any way to verify that the site is legit), and the flow of ad money for legitimate goods turns back to journalism, magazines and other publications?

That would be half a trillion[1] redirected to regular people just from Google Ads.

[1] snatched my number from here: https://pixis.ai/blog/2025-google-advertising-benchmarks-for...

reply
upvoteby ZeroGravitas11 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
The other day I watched a YouTube video on a work machine with no history and got 2 AI generated video ads for scam products before the video played.

An AI generated man talking about his product building journey to make a pressure washer hose that didn't need power (in the AI video it didn't even have a water supply connected!) that was going to be banned in a week because it was too powerful so buy now.

I've seen AI slop before and scam ads before but the combination of the two gave me some real tingly spider-sense that things are going to get worse and that some unethical people will make a lot of money from it so be in no hurry to stop it.

reply
upvoteby phillipcarter7 hours ago|
prev|
[-]
Two of the things you’ve listed are some of the most profitable activities in our economy.
reply
upvoteby timacles5 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
I mean, that says a lot about the kind of crisis out current economy is in. How much longer can the United States Be a world leader when it’s primary function is social media and advertising
reply