I want to believe that commoditization of AI will happen as you describe, with AI made by devs for devs.
So far what I see is “developer productivity is now up and 1 dev can do the work of 3? Good, fire 2 devs out of 3. Or you know what? Make it 5 out of 6, because the remaining ones should get used to working 60 hours/week.”
All that increased dev capacity needs to translate into new useful products. Right now the “new useful product” that all energies are poured into is… AI itself. Or even worse, shoehorning “AI-powered” features in all existing product, whether it makes sense or not (welcome, AI features in MS Notepad!). Once this masturbatory stage is over and the dust settles, I’m pretty confident that something new and useful will remain but for now the level of hype is tremendous!
Successful companies respond to this by hiring more developers.
Consider the taxi cab driver:
With the invention if the automobile, cab drivers could do their job way faster and way cheaper.
Did companies fire drivers in response? God no. They hired more
Why?
Because they became more affordable, less wealthy clients could now afford their services which means demand went way way up
If you can do your work for half the cost, usually demand goes up by way more than x2 because as you go down in wealth levels of target demographics, your pool of clients exponentially grows
If I go from “it costs me 100k to make you a website” to “it costs me 50k to make you a website” my pool of possible clients more than doubles
Which means… you need to hire more devs asap to start matching this newfound level of demand
If you fire devs when your demand is about to skyrocket, you fucked up bad lol
I want to believe that commoditization of AI will happen as you describe, with AI made by devs for devs. So far what I see is “developer productivity is now up and 1 dev can do the work of 3? Good, fire 2 devs out of 3. Or you know what? Make it 5 out of 6, because the remaining ones should get used to working 60 hours/week.”
All that increased dev capacity needs to translate into new useful products. Right now the “new useful product” that all energies are poured into is… AI itself. Or even worse, shoehorning “AI-powered” features in all existing product, whether it makes sense or not (welcome, AI features in MS Notepad!). Once this masturbatory stage is over and the dust settles, I’m pretty confident that something new and useful will remain but for now the level of hype is tremendous!
Companies that do this will fail.
Successful companies respond to this by hiring more developers.
Consider the taxi cab driver:
With the invention if the automobile, cab drivers could do their job way faster and way cheaper.
Did companies fire drivers in response? God no. They hired more
Why?
Because they became more affordable, less wealthy clients could now afford their services which means demand went way way up
If you can do your work for half the cost, usually demand goes up by way more than x2 because as you go down in wealth levels of target demographics, your pool of clients exponentially grows
If I go from “it costs me 100k to make you a website” to “it costs me 50k to make you a website” my pool of possible clients more than doubles
Which means… you need to hire more devs asap to start matching this newfound level of demand
If you fire devs when your demand is about to skyrocket, you fucked up bad lol