This is not idle speculation, this is something I have checked. I’ve worked with a lot of devs and spoken to them about their AI use. I’ve spoken to two people who lead large (80+ person) dev teams, one of them recently let go 30 devs specifically because those people were not integrating AI into their workflows fast enough, so they were moving too slow compared to people who had. Another said AI meant engineering was essentially no longer a bottleneck.
Also: many other professions are using AI a lot. This mostly looks like people semi-automating their own job, which doesn’t show up that much in economics statistics.
Please be aware if your read on the situation is more than a couple of months old, it’s stale data. The world is moving fast now.
This is not idle speculation, this is something I have checked. I’ve worked with a lot of devs and spoken to them about their AI use. I’ve spoken to two people who lead large (80+ person) dev teams, one of them recently let go 30 devs specifically because those people were not integrating AI into their workflows fast enough, so they were moving too slow compared to people who had. Another said AI meant engineering was essentially no longer a bottleneck.
I have never heard anything like this, and I am not persuaded by this anecdotal evidence. It seems pretty hard to believe on various levels. How do you (or how did he) know all 30 people were not integrating AI into their workflows fast enough? If it is really such a huge force multiplier that integration is the primary driver behind dev productivity, why don’t I find AI very useful for any serious project, despite trying it every week or so? Will he regret his decision in a few months? Do you have any statistics to back this anecdote up?
I’m working out of LISA right now, so I doubt my read on the situation is more than a couple of weeks old.
It’s a fair few anecdotes, plus some things like 25% of google’s code being written by AI in October, and comparing October models with today’s, how much of claude tokens is spent on code from their report, etc. I think I’ll tap out from this, don’t think trying to persuade you here is a sensible focus.
You seem to be referring to comments from the CEO that more than 25% of code at Google is written by AI (and reviewed by humans). I’m not sure how reliable this number is, and it remains to be seen whether this is sustainable. It also doesn’t seem like a vast productivity boost (though it would be pretty significant, probably more than I expect, so would update me).
I guess the professions that benefit most would be limited by two factors:
they work with virtual stuff, not material objects
mistakes don’t matter, because they are easy to notice
Translators get a huge multiplier, because you can skim the automatic translation and notice when something feels off. Software engineers can use unit tests. Who else is in this group?
Yes, but enough bugs caught can be enough to switch the equation from “this is not worth doing” to “worth doing, even if we need to check everything twice”.
It seems unlikely to me that software engineers are getting a vast multiplier from this technology while no one else is getting much.
This is not idle speculation, this is something I have checked. I’ve worked with a lot of devs and spoken to them about their AI use. I’ve spoken to two people who lead large (80+ person) dev teams, one of them recently let go 30 devs specifically because those people were not integrating AI into their workflows fast enough, so they were moving too slow compared to people who had. Another said AI meant engineering was essentially no longer a bottleneck.
Also: many other professions are using AI a lot. This mostly looks like people semi-automating their own job, which doesn’t show up that much in economics statistics.
Please be aware if your read on the situation is more than a couple of months old, it’s stale data. The world is moving fast now.
I have never heard anything like this, and I am not persuaded by this anecdotal evidence. It seems pretty hard to believe on various levels. How do you (or how did he) know all 30 people were not integrating AI into their workflows fast enough? If it is really such a huge force multiplier that integration is the primary driver behind dev productivity, why don’t I find AI very useful for any serious project, despite trying it every week or so? Will he regret his decision in a few months? Do you have any statistics to back this anecdote up?
I’m working out of LISA right now, so I doubt my read on the situation is more than a couple of weeks old.
It’s a fair few anecdotes, plus some things like 25% of google’s code being written by AI in October, and comparing October models with today’s, how much of claude tokens is spent on code from their report, etc. I think I’ll tap out from this, don’t think trying to persuade you here is a sensible focus.
You seem to be referring to comments from the CEO that more than 25% of code at Google is written by AI (and reviewed by humans). I’m not sure how reliable this number is, and it remains to be seen whether this is sustainable. It also doesn’t seem like a vast productivity boost (though it would be pretty significant, probably more than I expect, so would update me).
I guess the professions that benefit most would be limited by two factors:
they work with virtual stuff, not material objects
mistakes don’t matter, because they are easy to notice
Translators get a huge multiplier, because you can skim the automatic translation and notice when something feels off. Software engineers can use unit tests. Who else is in this group?
Many bugs will not be caught by unit tests.
Yes, but enough bugs caught can be enough to switch the equation from “this is not worth doing” to “worth doing, even if we need to check everything twice”.