AI productivity gains are closer to 10% than 10x(leaddev.com)

18 pointsby champagnepapi3 hours ago7 comments

mycentstoo3 hours ago
My unsolicited thoughts:
* AI will drive additional features as development accelerates
* There will be a window where fast adopting AI companies can deliver features faster than peers
* Those fast adopting AI companies will be able to garner additional revenue
* Gap closes as AI benefits slow in their impact to feature development and slower adopting companies catch up
* Companies that were faster adopters can no longer charge more for additional revenue without giving up market share to now caught-up competitors
* New normal is that companies are in a bind - they have to pay for tokens/AI aided development else they lose speed and therefore market share - but the paying is now without additional revenue and exists as a tax
Assumptions:
* No AGI
* LLMs have bounded impact on features
* Timeframe is long enough that companies that trail in AI won't be starved out
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iVHmp9F4Rl0
- discreteevent2 hours ago
  > There will be a window where fast adopting AI companies can deliver features faster than peers >Those fast adopting AI companies will be able to garner additional revenue
  The companies going 50% slower on reliable features that customers want to pay for will continue to wipe the floor with the hyper productive companies producing fluff.
horticulturist2 hours ago
The variation in individual developer throughput was as much as 20x pre-AI. 10% is basically nothing. You’d be better off firing your worst performer and replacing them with someone good (or great).
maleero3 hours ago
10% seems low. I think 1.5-3x is more like it without sacrificing quality. You can easily go 10x if you don’t care about the results too much.
- Tagbert3 hours ago
  There are probably larger gains in some areas like testing and coding. other areas, less so as they depend on messy data. I can tell you that only some areas of project management benefit from AI. the rest is more of a people problem.
- smcgan hour ago
  unless AI also speeds up the 84% of work that isn't coding, that is not possible.
- watwut3 hours ago
  > You can easily go 10x if you don’t care about the results too much.
  People are also much faster when they dont care about quality at all.
  - satvikpendeman hour ago
    Not really. There's a limit to how much you can focus on and literally type, even caring little about quality.
    watwut6 minutes ago
    You dont need to focus if you dont care about quality. Overworked teams do it all the time.
2 hours ago
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UltraSane2 hours ago
10% is still huge.
- discreteevent2 hours ago
  10% in profit is huge but that's not what the article is about.
  - UltraSane18 minutes ago
    A 10% increase to total labor productivity would be huge. It would add trillions to global GDP.
- smcgan hour ago
  it's much lower than common claims about AI.
  - UltraSane16 minutes ago
    Bit it would still add trillions to global GDP
simianwords3 hours ago
This is very similar to how you can double the employees in a company and only get marginal improvement in productivity.
If that’s true, AI gives the same gains doubling labour. No?
mytailorisrich3 hours ago
AI has the potential to be extremely powerful but it is also very new. People and organisations are just at the beginning of the learning process.
- goatlover3 hours ago
  Sure but the hype has been about the 10x productivity increases and how less employees are needed. Also all the AGI/singularity stuff being just around the corner, not simply AI potentially making employees a lot more productive.