Companies whose main core competency is writing code were already making up a big chunk of the economy before AI. Also, less wealthy companies were constrained in their use of software by the inability to afford the salaries of talented programmers (and ripoff practices from software consulting companies who in theory could help). Lowering the cost of building software systems ought to unblock a good amount of economic activity as the technology diffuses.

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bunderbunder 11 days ago | parent | next [-]

Those companies are certainly writing more code. But It isn’t clear that they are increasing their economic productivity. It could even conceivably have the opposite effect by fueling a race to the bottom.

e.g. an interesting possible canary in this coal mine is that there’s been a 200% increase in the rate of new apps appearing on Apple’s App Store, but it has not been accompanied by a 200% increase in the rate at which people are buying apps.

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andwur 11 days ago | parent | next [-]

The AI pundits often seem to apply the logic that code output is directly proportional to revenue and/or profit, and as such it follows that an AI usage increase leads to more code which leads to more revenue.

I don't believe this aligns with the reality of any major company, unless your business is in the literal sense "selling code" your revenue and profit is tangential to the quantity of code you produce. Google is a good example of this: most of their revenue and profit comes from their ad network, which is disconnected from their development productivity and instead heavily reliant on network effects and time in market. If I was a new competitor with infinite AI funds to throw at whatever problem I choose, I can't simply capture their market by developing an exact copy of Google's ad platform. In the same way, Google can't substantially grow their ad network by coding "more" or "better", they still need more customers and consumers to interact with their network to see any increase in revenue.

So it doesn't directly follow that a productivity increase will inherently follow an AI usage increase.

	▲	bunderbunder 11 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Agreed. I think it’s more likely to expect that most of it is pure waste. My impression is that most software development work is not profitable. Either the project is abandoned, or it fails, or it gets shipped but doesn’t generate positive ROI. But, like how venture capital works, the minority of projects that are successful make enough money to cover the rest. Some portion of this is because demand for software projects in general is less than perfectly elastic. So more software does not automatically mean more software sales. It also seems plausible that, in general, companies tend to fund the projects that are most likely to be profitable. They aren’t perfect at it, but I doubt they’re just rolling dice. Which would imply that the new work companies can take on thanks to developer productivity gains will tend to be ones that are less likely to generate positive ROI. meaning AI may only produce a net increase in waste, which only serves to erode profits. Add to that that it’s been years now and we still don’t have an example of someone army-of-oneing a killer app or anything like that. It’s beginning to feel like another iteration of the amazing blockchain revolution that was always & forever just around the corner.
	▲	ashdksnndck 10 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The unlocked economic activity won’t come from a Google competitor writing code faster. A lot of it will come from “boring” businesses who could benefit from custom software but haven’t had the means to create it themselves. In some cases they may not even know their problem can be solved by software, but some AI they are using for repetitive tasks will notice and offer to build an app for them.

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timacles 11 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I would go as far as to say writing more Code has almost no impact on their economic productivity. What drives those companies is infrastructure and networks

	▲	nobleach 11 days ago \| parent [-]
		So far the place where I've seen "more code being written" having a postive effect, has been in paying down tech debt and reduction of overhead. We've rewritten services (bringing multiple microservices back under moduliths) and cut costs. But I'm talking about net-negative code. That's not the point you're making. I agree that puking out 20 new features likely wouldn't gain us more revenue.

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therealdrag0 11 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s great for consumers.

	▲	lelanthran 11 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		A lower signal/noise ratio is never better for consumers.
	▲	bryanrasmussen 11 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		If the quality of all apps remains high, but if there is an increase of low quality apps it may not necessarily be great for consumers as it becomes difficult to distinguish which are the good and bad quality apps, making it risky to purchase apps.
	▲	bandrami 11 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Not necessarily. European grocery shoppers report higher satisfaction with the shopping experience than American grocery shoppers do.

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samat 11 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I am yet to see that ‘companies with great ideas which simply cannot afford those very expensive developers’. For the most, issue is not programmer costs. Mostly it’s inability to formulate the MVP which makes sense.

‘uber for my industry’ is not a sensible business strategy

Honestly, if you know guys whose bottleneck is pure software dev — please let me know, I have a good, experienced team in Eastern Europe, we can do wonders in product development. But coming up with sensible business ideas and executing on them in the real world is crazy hard and extremely rare.

	▲	ashdksnndck 10 days ago \| parent [-]
		Can you believe that the barrier to entry on a $20 Claude subscription is lower than emailing a guy to hire a team for a project you haven’t even thought of yet? Regular people who are using AI to assist with their daily work will find the chatbot offering to build software tools to automate the work for them.

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timacles 11 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You are wrong, sir. Their core competency is building out infrastructure and networks to support their software and user base. software is by far the least complicated thing they do.

what makes YouTube YouTube is not the video player it’s the servers that can handle petabytes of uploads a day and billions of views. YouTube software wise, is no different from the 100s of porn websites that are coded by small European teams

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IsTom 11 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If we talking about Meta, Google, etc. code is only incidental to them earning money.