Okay so assuming engineer compensation of $200k, you’re suggesting something like a thousand-fold productivity increase on this task in terms of cost and 26x or more in terms of time?
You say "not worth pursuing", which could also be phrased as "too costly to pursue". With much more capacity available, it becomes possible to do more things. This is true for lots of things.
> Productivity is a measure of economic performance that compares the amount of goods and services produced (output) with the amount of inputs used to produce those goods and services.
The inputs here are money and the labor of the engineer. With this new form of automation, it takes far less of both. So much less in fact, that a previously uneconomical project is now positively cheap.
If your point is that the result isn't worth what it would have cost before, that's true, but it's the increase in productivity that changed the value proposition and allowed the project to be accomplished economically.
1. https://www.bls.gov/k12/productivity-101/content/what-is-pro...
Literally the output of the labor dropped to almost zero value?
In this case, is the change of this software from one language to another/framework to another even valuable?
Example: if I manufacture $1,000 worth of some illegal drug that will potentially turn a normal functioning adult into an addicted criminal, how shall we measure my productivity?
This instead is a concern for newer devs. There is now no argument for bringing on the cadre of workers you’d need to do all the hand-jamming, testing, and reviewing, learning how to code in the process.
The remaining 10% of devs that I don't fire. How much software do I really need?
Anyway, I know there are some flaws in my argument, it was just a thought experiment.
Dev teams should be leaner now, with maybe at most a director as their manager up to executive level.
As for ‘how much software do I really need?’ Well, what sort of company is it? Do you have internal applications to support your orgs? If you seriously need to ask ‘how much software do I need?’ Then you should just fire yourself.
Some bean counter will want to replace the principal devs with juniors since Claude can do all the work instead…
Before those 200 people would be occupied digging the tunnel.
Now you get the tunnel plus 200 people doing other work in society…
Ultimately, the economic analysis needs to use monetary units. How much faster can return on investment be realized, and at what scale? This analysis has proven elusive because people believe that the very definition, not just the execution, of a task can be delegated to an LLM (which in some trivial sense must be true because means and ends are never sharply distinguished).
Because everyone in the world doing more of the wrong things faster isn't necessarily a good thing.
The engineer still spent a week there.
On a more serious note, the productivity increase is the time which will no longer be needed to maintain two production systems instead of one.
Yes, that is something you have to be careful of. In this case, as I mentioned I believe, it was done in spare time, not full time, and it was mostly the AI that spent 2 weeks, I'd guess he probably spent a day or two, and the testers probably spent another day (however, I think this ended up coinciding with our quarterly "full site" test, so it would have happened anyway).