This is something I’ve been turning over in my head lately. I’m not denying AI is being used everywhere, but I don’t know if it’s actually helping businesses overall. If we shut it all down it seems that businesses would be fine (and maybe even better since there’d be no token burning budgets).

Pretty much nothing. We'd remove the AI integrations, the UI elements, then back to where we were. Luckily, we have no load bearing AI.

But if everyone else got to keep their AI, we'd lose customers very quickly.

I would guess that AI has given me a 30% improvement in pace? I don't know, it would feel like riding a bike on level ground instead of downhill

The effort required to do most jobs has gone down and so has the output quality. Rather than doing the same quality work with less effort, some people use LLMs to produce minimum-quality work at minimum effort.

LLMs are a cool tool but we’re over-encouraging use in every domain, even tasks they’re not good at. Every tech company in the world seems to be getting rich though how can I possibly say things would be better without it?

I’d have to stop interacting with meat proxies and wouldn’t have to read copy pasted LLM text.

We’d save a lot of time not sitting on calls while managers show us the results of their brainstorming sessions with Claude. Instead we could focus on making the products better again.

Several people would have their incompetence more visible.

I would stop coming up with sk many ideas that AI isn't great at helping me finish.

I'm fairly confident our management has managed to spend more on failed or pointless AI efforts than AI could produce in benefits.

If you tell every manager they need to show some sort of success with AI, you get a lot of projects that don't make sense, which then quietly die, and the process repeats.

We're an app dev agency so we would inflate our costs and timelines by 5x and we'd never win another bid.

I generally agree that the business does not see increased productivity and revenue from AI, if it does it is small enough to be within error.

That said, if everyone (not just devs) came in and there was no AI, the org would come to a halt. AI is load-bearing in my company. Everything from dev, code reviews, planning, doc writing, ops heavily uses AI. I mean heavily, there are dev that would not know where to start triaging an alarm without the robots. Same with customer service. So much of the human capital has leaked out of peoples' brains that is fair to compare it to brain drain.

Realistically, it would be painful for 1-3 months. People would go to teams with AI. A year from now, leadership is gonna have a hard time justifying keeping the lights out.

It is akin to asking "what would happen if your company stopped using the internet(to look things up)".

It’s impossible now, I would need to hire more homosapiens and there is a shortage of them. I use local models, so AI is equal to human time, human brain. It’s new reality for us

In support, we chuck in the logs and get detailed analysis of possible problems and causes. AI based support request handling has been literally Godsend.

We'd probably do a career change, writing blogs and aspiring to become influencers on Tiktok or something. :)

We would probably be fine, but much slower.

However if everyone else stopped using AI we would be broke, so please don't do that.

Productivity would go up and most people apart from 5% addicts would rejoice.

Hotfixes would go down by probably 50 to 60%. On a bi-weekly release rotation it was not abnormal to see 4 to 5 hot fix versions. In the past year, however, it is not uncommon to do 15 hotfix builds per release.

I'd have to do more manual work, but nothing major would happen. We don't use AI in our product at all.

One-man show here - I own a dozen small e-commerce brands. I'll assume you're just taking away AI, but not the tools I've built with AI.

I've got all kinds of useful tools that do helpful things, like check to make sure Amazon hasn't lost a bunch of my inventory or suddenly deindexed my product from search. These sorts of things happen without warning from time to time and are trivially fixable if you catch them, but you have to be constantly monitoring 10 different things to catch anything that could go wrong in a timely fashion.

I've similarly got an inventory/cashflow management system that's deterministic that would be fine, but some of my other tools, like one that scrapes my Alibaba/WeChat/Whatsapp/Gmail supplier convos to keep my order status board updated, is finicky. I wouldn't be able to repair that once it broke.

For some tasks, I'd have to go back to freelancers. At this point, when I take over a new brand and want to refresh images or want to A/B test new ones with an existing brand, I can do that entirely with image gen. No AI would just send me back to Upwork.

For other tasks, I'd just have to do them myself. Right now when I acquire a brand, I have a Claude skill that runs through all of the Amazon search and ads reports to find the key search terms, analyzes the text of the listing and proposes updates to make sure we're hitting the ones that matter. I used to do that myself, but it takes somewhere between 2-10 hours depending how many products we're talking about.

The biggest loss would be the inability to expand. I started out just buying Amazon-only brands because Amazon provides a crazy amount of infrastructure that enables me to run a lot of them by myself. My most recent acquisition came with a Shopify site that had minimal sales plus a Meta ad account the guy who sold me the brand had done a little experimentation with. A year ago, I would've just discarded those, since my time is the biggest bottleneck. It takes a lot of time to run your own site and Meta ads, so it makes more sense for me not to bother and instead just make more Amazon-only acquisitions.

But now I'm having a great time really pushing Claude and ChatGPT to do most of the work. I redesigned the site more or less by just having ChatGPT do research on competitors and best practices, then having Claude run with that. That took maybe eight total hours of work.

I'm spinning up an enormous amount of creative to test on Meta, and I had ChatGPT research and spec all of the kinds of landing pages that are worth trying. Claude implemented them and set up the ads using Meta's ads APIs. I got all of that done yesterday.

So yeah, basically if I couldn't use AI any more, I'd get back to the original thesis of my business, which is buying small brands at reasonable prices and operating them as leanly as possible. It still works, but it'd be a lot less fun and profitable.

- Code quality would go up - Code quantity would go down - Discussions online will feel normal again - Email threads will become burdersome again

'all AI', or just all LLMs/coding assistants? It would be hugely disruptive to the world if no businesses could do any machine learning any more.

My new business would instantly die, my old business (30+ years) would barely notice; those clients ain’t going nowhere.

It would result in higher quality and lesser quantity which would be better for good

Honestly?

I could theoretically maintain my output, yes.

Practically nope, not because I can't do the work without AI, as much as because of burnout - both from technical (Ansible, Python - neither are a thing I like using) and social (dealing with corpospeak) reasons.

Nothing in our product runs on AI but productivity would slow down for sure.

All our devs would lose it. They will be lost

The only thing we use large models (they are not fucking AI, never will be, and calling them that only supports the hype nonsense) for in actual production is voicing generic IVR messages and such. If we lost that we'd go back to having to record them ourselves. Whoopdeedoo.

Other than that, interacting with my boss would become less stupid (or at least be his own variety of it instead of ChatGPT's variety of stupid) and nothing meaningful would change.

Everyone who's saying that they wouldn't get anything done at all, you're already doomed and I can't wait to watch the collapse after this crap has ruined so much.

Code quality would definitely go up.

I would cry a lot. I love my Claude Code :)

But other than that nothing really.

Total collapse, idiot managers already fired everyone that knew how anything worked and now they're completely fucked. Frankly I have no idea how I've managed to hang on this long but likely to be gone myself in a few weeks as well.

Personally I would be lost, because we've implemented everything around AI, more than a year ago with the assumption that models will keep getting better so the importance of building the tooling around it is capital and we've made the right choice, now close to ALL issues and features and customer requests are automatically solved.

The main issue I see is that currently managing 70 repos would just be physically impossible without re-hiring people versus like now with 8 monitors in grid and averaging 32 threads (4 per monitor) and being a bot for 10 hours a day, saturating about 20 subscriptions (mix Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Xiaomi, Minimax...) in total currently using our own tools, about $100K equivalent in token a month.

While I loved the era of before, I would genuinely be instantly depressed to go back to it knowing that the problematics have completely shifted, this isn't a 20% improvement or something, it's straight 10x increase (at least lately) and I'm quite conservative when I say 10x, people that have focused on their tooling and not use the general harnesses will understand what I mean.

I use AI daily as well to build tools for my daughter, toddler video-games, daily books... and so-on, it would be so frustrating to lose this.

There'd be a huge problem training enough replacement humans to do the work to the low standard of the retired bots. We might have to settle for a rise in the quality of work. /i

If it were just my company and not the whole industry for some newly discovered reason/vulnerability, I would quit because leadership has gone retarded.