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Comment by contagiousflow | Hacker News Reader

Why do you have a backlog then? If a current AI can do 100% of it then just run it over the weekend and close everything

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As always, the limit is human bandwidth. But that's basically what AI-forward companies are doing now. I would be curious which tasks OP commenter has that couldn't be done by an agent (assuming they're a SWE)

This sounds bogus to me: if AI really could close 100% of your backlog with just a couple more humans in the loop, you’d hire a bunch of temps/contractors to do that, then declare the product done and lay off everybody. How come that isn’t happening?

Because there's an unlimited amount of work to do. This is the same reason you are not fired once completing a feature :-) The point of hiring a FTE is to continue to create work that provides business value. For your analogy, FTEs often do that by hiring temp, and you can think of the agent as the new temp in this case - the human drives an infinite amount of them

Why hasn’t any of the software I use started shipping features at a breakneck speed then? The only thing any of them have added is barely working AI features.

Why aren’t there 10x the number of games on steam? Why aren’t people releasing new integrated programming language/OS/dev environments?

Why does our backlog look exactly the same as when I left for posterity leave 4 months ago?

Questions posed in bad faith can only be answered by the author.

Someone asked why the backlog doesn’t get finished. You answered that it does but the backlog just refills. So I asked where is the backlog evidence that the original backlog was completed.

I’m still waiting for the evidence. I still haven’t seen externally verifiable evidence that AI is a net productivity boost for the ability to ship software.

That doesn’t mean that it isn’t. It does mean that it isn’t big enough to be obvious.

I’m very closet watching every external metric I can find. Nothing yet. Just saw the steam metrics for January. Fewer titles than January last year.

Sounds more like busy work rather than something that makes money

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