| ▲ | ttul 5 hours ago | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I don't see why a payoff would have appeared yet. Many (but certainly not all) software companies have increased their output without hiring more people. But having software with more features doesn't necessarily drive immediate productivity gains in the rest of the economy. It will take time for those benefits to percolate. We've only had access to models good enough to majorly accelerate code writing since early-2026. I feel like we're in the very beginnings of the first part of this wave. For sake of comparison, consider e-commerce. As a proxy for "impact on the economy", we can use Amazon's revenue. They went public in 1997 and that year had revenue of $148M (just 0.14% of Walmart's revenue that year). By 2000, revenue was $2.76B (1.65% of Walmart). Bricks and mortar didn't start feeling anything until probably 2011, when Amazon crossed 11% of Walmart's revenue. And it wasn't until 2025 that Amazon finally surpassed Walmart. But, if you worked in tech in the e-commerce business, things were already feeling pretty hot by 2007. And at that point in time, the e-commerce sector was still miniscule compared to traditional retail (~4%). Software is very exciting these days and the most fantastic things are happening. They will eventually percolate out to the rest of the economy. But it will take many years before everyone notices the difference. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | byko3y 7 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
>We've only had access to models good enough to majorly accelerate code writing since early-2026. I feel like we're in the very beginnings of the first part of this wave. The people talking about "increased output" — do you have any proofs for these words? I'm working in IT — I don't see any radical productivity growth. Yes, you can doo hello world 4 times faster now — but even then when you need to polish it the speed of development stabilizes near baseline real quick. The early 2026 research shows only modest improvement in productivity: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2025.00535 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | bagacrap 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tbh my day job is now bogged down with security fixes for bugs found by AI. I guess that's a productivity gain by some measure? Sure we're fixing lots of problems. Problems we were blissfully unaware of before (and arguably were not problems, if no human could find them). Meanwhile, at least half of the engineers have been pulled off other projects to work on, well, anything that has the veneer of AI attached to it. So we've lost half of the workforce to AI. But sure, the 25% of engineer hours still working on core product have gotten 40% more productive! (Actual coding, 2-3x, but that was never the majority of the work.) What is the long term steady state here? Not sure if there even is one. But I've always spit balled that my job would be 90% less effort if all humans were good faith actors (no need to worry about privacy and security). Just ditching those two considerations is a 10x multiplier. So conversely, if the bad actors are empowered 10x by these tools, instead of 10% of my job being actual functionality, maybe 1% can be. I need the (promised) 10x boost of ai just to get back to the historical base case. Perhaps the people seeing massive productivity gains are ones who never bothered with security to begin with (ahem Sony). | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | geraneum 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> Many (but certainly not all) software companies have increased their output without hiring more people What do you mean by output? LoC? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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