>On the plus side for us worker bees, this is why I never really bought in to the narrative that our jobs were inevitably doomed. A question I've posed a few times: Consider two reasonably similar competitors with 100 engineers two years ago. Suppose AI really does accelerate development 10x times. It doesn't (at least not yet) but the larger number helps bring the question into focus. One company fires 90 engineers and does the same work with the remaining 10. The other company keeps all its engineers and does 10 times the work. Who wins in the market?

The one who understands that "10 times the work" is not necessarily absorbable by the market, and adjust to whatever lesser value still works, and still fires a lot of the 100.

▲

Buttons840 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

A lot of the fired then make a Discord and casually replicate the company's product.

That's how it will eventually pan out, but I guess the company gets a bag before the collapse.

▲

coldtea 18 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

>A lot of the fired then make a Discord and casually replicate the company's product.

And they find out replicating the product means little, it's the customer base, industry reputations, connections, support, ecosystem, and stuff, that matter.

	▲	hackyhacky 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Wait, you mean my vibecoded Facebook ripoff won't make me a billionaire like Zuck? Bummer.

▲

Grombobulous 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is why recessions often lead to a burst in new companies being founded.

One of the experiences that stuck with my in my early career was when my coworkers heard talk of layoffs at their startup that was acquired by bigcorp, one of the first reactions was “maybe we should just do another startup.”

I was taken aback at how casually that idea was thrown around. They didn’t even have a specific idea, just the casual thought that they could just start another company.

	▲	coldtea 16 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		>I was taken aback at how casually that idea was thrown around. They didn’t even have a specific idea, just the casual thought that they could just start another company. That's how a lot of companies are made, even huge ones. Not everything comes from a specific focus, it's just "let's see what works to build a business that can make us money".
	▲	abanana 7 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		It's the VC/Silicon Valley mindset. They want to be able to call themselves "entrepreneurs" and "founders"; the product has little importance compared to that. It goes some way to explaining why the vast majority fail.
	▲	Buttons840 34 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		"MegaCorp clearly wants to buy out any competition, so we should just leave and build the same thing again." And now you don't even have to use specialist knowledge, just describe the idea to AI and AI will implement it clean-room.

▲

10111001 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> A lot of the fired then make a Discord and casually replicate the company's product.

And what's going to be the result of that? Can the market really support that many competitors comfortably, and/or are you setting yourself up for business failure or Chinese-style involution and 996?

See, I want a comfortable happy life, not a stress-filled one of maximum market efficiency. AI + capitalism doesn't look like it's going to provide the former.

▲

Buttons840 42 minutes ago | parent [-]

The market can't support it. The value of software will trend towards zero.

The less society spends on developers, the less valuable software is. If the day comes that we employ zero developers, then software will be worth zero dollars.

And yet, software will still be fulfilling an essential part of society, it just wont be a thing people are willing to pay for. So AI will still be around, and will still be essential (because somehow we have to maintain all this software), and AI will get better and better.

Eventually any knowledge work will be worth zero. Including the C-suite--especially the c-suite!

	▲	solyin 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Except, they're the ones holding the money. So they can farm their job off to an ai and retire to their yachts.

▲

techpression 11 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

This... It's weird how companies and people think adding something is the same as adding value. Feature creep was an issue even before AI, now we see one worse feature being added after the next (does anyone even know all the touch controls of iOS or even macOS, as an example), with some expectation of that there will be money coming in because of it.

I benefit greatly from AI myself, but I use it to augment my capabilities, not as a slot machine for building things nobody will ever use, which seems to be the norm based on the products I use.