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> If AI makes everyone 10x engineers, you can 2x the productive output while reducing headcount by 5x.

Why wouldn't you just 10x the productive output instead?

I don't think it would be trivial to increase demand by 10x (or even 2x) that quickly. Eventually, a publicly traded company will get a bad quarter, at which point it's much easier to just reduce the number of employees. In both scenarios, there's no need for any new-hire.

I think there’s always demand for more software and more features. Have you ever seen a team without a huge backlog? The demand is effectively infinite.

Isn’t a lot of stuff in the backlog because it’s not important enough to the bottom line to prioritize?

Right, that’s kind of the whole point. If it’s in the backlog, someone thinks it’s valuable, but you might never get to it because of other priorities. If you’re 10x more productive, that line gets pushed a lot farther out, and your product addresses more people’s needs, has fewer edge case bugs, and so on.

If the competition instead uses their productivity boost to do layoffs and increase short term profits, you are likely to outcompete them over time.

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