upvote
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
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
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
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
That’s great for consumers.
reply
A lower signal/noise ratio is never better for consumers.
reply
Not necessarily. European grocery shoppers report higher satisfaction with the shopping experience than American grocery shoppers do.
reply
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
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
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
If we talking about Meta, Google, etc. code is only incidental to them earning money.
reply