It's a little more nuanced than this. Claude can't actually replace an experienced coder, but in two steps:

1. Claude makes every experienced coder more productive, 2. The industry decides to hire fewer experienced coders to get the same level of productivity,

We have now accomplished putting some large percentage of experienced coders out of work without actually replicating what they do.

It is, however, making me a bit crazy that the industry's response to (presumed!) increased productivity has been to cut costs rather than invest more broadly and deeply in software.

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Ekaros 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I have long questioned the mantra that software needs more investments or even produce positive returns when it gets it. Just look at what many of these big companies with untold resources and investments have actually produced in recent years... Maybe cost optimisation and freeing up capital for something else is the correct move.

	▲	tonyedgecombe 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I like to think of the Facebook iOS app which had 18,000 classes in it. It was so large that it couldn't be loaded into Xcode. Imagine if those programmers had Claude back then, they could have produced ten times as much code.

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bluefirebrand 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> It is, however, making me a bit crazy that the industry's response to (presumed!) increased productivity has been to cut costs rather than invest more broadly and deeply in software

It's almost like they don't actually believe (or care if) it is increasing productivity and are just using it as an excuse to cut costs

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reverius42 3 days ago | parent [-]

Still doesn't make sense to me then, even ignoring AI -- why are they cutting costs while making record revenues and profits?

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coldtea 2 days ago | parent [-]

Because they're seeing the writing on the wall - the economic is going to shit.

Their "record revenues and profits" just come from squeezing their customers, already at breaking point, to the max, to just move the needle in the stock market. They know this is not sustainable at all.

	▲	reverius42 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Isn't the assumption of overall economic growth kind of load bearing for capitalism? What happens when the whole economy starts planning for contraction instead?