alt Hacker NewsAll good questions. I am not a big believer in claiming I know whether we are in a financial bubble or not. I just put it all in VT and we will see what happens. I know that the AI allows me to write code I couldn’t write before much more quickly than before but I admit that this may not help with organizational friction.
Although if this theory is true — that AI helps with coding but coding is not the friction point in organizations with multiple humans, even that should allow faster iteration by allowing one human to do more coding therefore reducing the size of teams required to make some programs. You should see good acceleration in solo shops too.
Yeah, again the answer is definitely not no AI. And I’ve seen the - you know - I can one shot whole applications that would have taken me weeks or months before. But it’s also much easier to one shot apps that aren’t in the critical path. I’m building all sorts of tools to make my job easier, but I still have to do the job.
I’m a platform engineer. The primary failure mode for platform engineers is building tools people don’t want. AI doesn’t really make that easier. Or it can but it can also make it harder by making it easier to chase down ideas that you don’t get traction on. And I think that - net balanced across the organization is probably why productivity gains get sort of averaged out.
For sure I think solo devs who have a system are seeing gains, as long as you can I think have the discipline to have a process that includes feedback and learning and your not just feeding off of dopamine hits of one shotting features but yeah. I mean for solo devs the code was never really the limiting factor, it was product-market fit and marketing.
So solo devs who have a system may be laughing themselves all the way to the bank, but we may not see a lot of net new solo devs.
But if code is cheap now then it’s sort of inherently devalued. 2 8 person startups can probably relatively easily find a dev with AI experience to rocket ship their code generation, which means the basic skills of talking to customers, change management, and building the right thing become even more valuable.
Even solo devs I wonder - almost every post-mortem of a failed company goes “I wish we had spent more time talking to customers and less time writing code”
Again if you can get the discipline right, maybe as a solo devs you can get more work done faster and spend more time with your family. That’s incredibly valuable!
But if you go and add a big new feature, or a second product - unless your community is primed for constant growth(no man’s sky is one community where more more more seems good) you’re just growing the surface area where all the other skills are more necessary.