alt Hacker NewsWhile that is true, I find that in a small company / startup environment you are almost always working on something that will contribute to revenue. The list is long. And you don’t have that much time for nonsense if you’re doing it right.
The other factor here is scaling of humans. Without these tools we would need a lot more humans. We don’t need as many but the ones we do have are heavily taxed. That salary savings should be passed on (again, relative productivity to AI spend) but we’ll see!
I once would have said that about startups, but lately I’ve been working at a very small one and I’ve seen with my own eyes how agentic coding rapidly undermined the company’s ability to effectively prioritize. It has basically killed the correlation between initial planning/development cost and ongoing support/maintenance cost. And it had developers implementing things so quickly that the product manager couldn’t keep up, which meant that he was basically just approving everything, including the half baked ideas, just to avoid coming under pressure for stalling the development pipeline.
I’m sure the ship will eventually right itself, but it’s going to take some time for the profession to digest how AI coding has changed things and how to adjust incumbent working norms to account for it.