However, note that if 10 people in a 1,000-person company get a 10x speedup, that’s only a ~10% overall speedup
Plausible. Potential counter-argument: software engineers aren’t equivalent, “10x engineers” are a thing, and if we assume they’re high-agency people always looking to streamline and improve their workflows, we should expect them to be precisely the people who get a further 10x boost from LLMs. Have you observed any specific people suddenly becoming 10x more prolific?
But these were one-offs where I wasn’t very familiar with the language (SQL, HTML)
Flat cost reductions, yeah. Though, uniformly slashing the costs on becoming proficient in new sub-domains of programming perhaps could have nontrivial effects on the software industry as a whole…
For example, perhaps the actual impact of LLMs should instead be modeled as all (competent) programmers effectively becoming able to use any and all programming languages/tools at offer (plus knowing of the existence of these tools)? Which, in idealized theory, should lead to every piece of a software project being built using the best tools available for it, rather than being warped by what the specific developer happened to be proficient in.
“10x engineers” are a thing, and if we assume they’re high-agency people always looking to streamline and improve their workflows, we should expect them to be precisely the people who get a further 10x boost from LLMs. Have you observed any specific people suddenly becoming 10x more prolific?
In addition to the objection from Archimedes, another reason this is unlikely to be true is that 10x coders are often much more productive than other engineers because they’ve heavily optimized around solving for specific problems or skills that other engineers are bottlenecked by, and most of those optimizations don’t readily admit of having an LLM suddenly inserted into the loop.
“10x engineers” are a thing, and if we assume they’re high-agency people always looking to streamline and improve their workflows, we should expect them to be precisely the people who get a further 10x boost from LLMs.
I highly doubt this. A 10x engineer is likely already bottlenecked by non-coding work that AI can’t help with, so even if they 10x their coding, they may not increase overall productivity much.
Plausible. Potential counter-argument: software engineers aren’t equivalent, “10x engineers” are a thing, and if we assume they’re high-agency people always looking to streamline and improve their workflows, we should expect them to be precisely the people who get a further 10x boost from LLMs. Have you observed any specific people suddenly becoming 10x more prolific?
Flat cost reductions, yeah. Though, uniformly slashing the costs on becoming proficient in new sub-domains of programming perhaps could have nontrivial effects on the software industry as a whole…
For example, perhaps the actual impact of LLMs should instead be modeled as all (competent) programmers effectively becoming able to use any and all programming languages/tools at offer (plus knowing of the existence of these tools)? Which, in idealized theory, should lead to every piece of a software project being built using the best tools available for it, rather than being warped by what the specific developer happened to be proficient in.
In addition to the objection from Archimedes, another reason this is unlikely to be true is that 10x coders are often much more productive than other engineers because they’ve heavily optimized around solving for specific problems or skills that other engineers are bottlenecked by, and most of those optimizations don’t readily admit of having an LLM suddenly inserted into the loop.
I highly doubt this. A 10x engineer is likely already bottlenecked by non-coding work that AI can’t help with, so even if they 10x their coding, they may not increase overall productivity much.