Now feels like a very good time to be a small team of experienced developers who can largely work on stuff by themselves and not a corporation of hundreds of developers of varying abilities all now trying to show how much code they can generate and how many tokens they can burn.

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niwtsol an hour ago | parent | next [-]

100% - I think that is also part of the divide you see online. Devs who work on massive codebases w/ 100s of engineers and see the bugs the LLMs create vs devs who work on smaller codebase w/ small <5 person team.

	▲	aantix 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's a tradeoff. Generating a feature that is 90% correct in a tenth of the time is a reasonable tradeoff if you're trying to gain traction. Generating a feature that is 90% correct in a tenth of the time, risking a multi-billion-dollar business, is a terrible tradeoff.

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dylan604 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Even small teams are not immune from the AI push. I work in a small <10 people with 3 devs. I'm the only one not using AI while receiving push that I'm a problem for not. To the point, VP of company says if we don't all start using AI we'll be out of business because other people will. :face-palm:

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niwtsol an hour ago | parent | next [-]

You don't use AI at all? What is your main justification for not?

	▲	pesus 12 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Seems like you should have a justification for introducing a new tool instead, no? There are thousands of other tools they're also not using, but we're not asking about those.

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foldr an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I think the jury’s still out on how big an impact AI will have on overall, average productivity. But it’s definitely a productivity boost for someone who’s capable of writing code without it. If you want to be super conservative, don’t even have it write any code. Use it to search through existing codebases, review your code, find the root cause of bug reports, evaluate pros and cons of alternative approaches, etc. etc. You’re really missing out by not using it at all.

Here’s a concrete example of conservative AI usage: I use Claude to vibe code my nvim config. Now, who cares if my nvim config is AI slop? What’s the worst that can happen? Nvim works for me now way better than it ever did when I was limited by the time I was willing to spend configuring it manually.