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Comment by tedggh | Hacker News Reader

There’s no real productivity increase because that project was not worth pursuing before AI. It’s like wanting to build a tunnel in the 1700s by having 200 people digging it by hand, vs actually building it using machines in the 2000s. We don’t say there was an increase in productivity. The technology enabled a project that used to be a dream.

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> What is Productivity? [1]

> 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...

I'm being sarcastic as to the specifics but didn't productivity go down 199k because the 200k engineer is now replaceable with a 1k subscription and will soon be fired?

Literally the output of the labor dropped to almost zero value?

The subscription didn’t do any work though. It didn’t magically create a new knowledge worker any more than a lawn mower in a shed cuts grass. The output of the labor massively skyrocketed in value. If you fire that dev, who do you think will use Claude?

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.

> If you fire that dev, who do you think will use Claude?

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.

If you’re the CIO/CTO/etc. obviously you wouldn’t be fired, but any other position is useless down to the dev.

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.

I don’t think your point is meritless, but this is specifically a discussion about that top-10% dev. The one doing this type of work is not the one who will be let go.

I know a lot of people think that the AI tools level the playing-field, but we aren't experiencing that. The guy that did this translation is doing more tickets than the other 4 software devs combined. And it's not because they are low-effort tickets. That's also on top of the 6 hours a week of meetings he has that the other devs don't.

I wonder if seniors are all that safe.

Some bean counter will want to replace the principal devs with juniors since Claude can do all the work instead…

Productivity can be measured in many ways. Neoclassical economists will tell you there’s only one.

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?

We literally do say that having more infrastructure is a result of increased productivity.

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.

In this case the situation was that we had other higher priorities for the last decade so we were walking around with this technical debt.

Is that entirely true?

Before those 200 people would be occupied digging the tunnel.

Now you get the tunnel plus 200 people doing other work in society…

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