Considering that’s a healthy portion of a salary for an additional employee per person, the fact they’re slashing spending sure makes it look like AI wasn’t even a 2x multiplier at minimum.
replyYou could only conclude that if they would have dropped LLMs completely. It just means they see the benefit/cost optimum at a lower point than 100k/programmer.
replyI also doubt a longterm 2x multiplier for most developers.
I don't think you need the LLMs to be completely dropped to indicate this. Even entry-level faang programmer salaries are in the 300k range, so the fact that LLMs aren't worth 100k/programmer does tell us something about the marginal usefulness. If the drop was motivated was motivated purely by price-per-output, it would indicate the LLMs are less useful than adding another 1/3 engineer. However, as discussed in other comments, there are other motivations as well, notably dogfooding homegrown tooling.
replyWe're sitting on a year of more or less capable coding models and I have not exactly seen a revolution in new software being released. AI is likely a force multiplier for specific subsets of individuals and workflows. Coding is not a bottleneck for a lot of systems.
replyI suspect that SaaS is silently being eaten alive as an industry.
I think SaaS will be fine. How the field works might change, but in the end marginal cost of software is still zero and when you've got a quality, well-tested and well-designed product it's going to be obviously better than things vibed together.
replyYou often pay for regulatory compliance and liability with SaaS. Would you risk running your own vibe-coded payroll or accounting system for your company?
replyTalk to the emulator community. Huge leaps being made there. Or binary decompiling topics. Huge leaps there. There is more than web applications
replyVery likely a negative multiplier.
replyIt’s mostly from people using their personal accounts to run LLM services that serve a larger team or organization. At least at Microsoft, it’s still impressively hard to get access to an LLM for service usage with high enough rate limits to be useful, making running services on dev boxes much more appealing (despite the countless drawbacks that few people seem to care about around security, compliance, reliability, etc).
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