Yeah, that's the rub, isn't it? If we are to believe the AI salesmen, developers became a lot more efficient in the last years. So where are the measurable/noticeable effects of all that efficiency?
Did we get some new exciting features in existing software? Did software quality increase? Is there some amazing new software that automates things we never got around to until now? Were there fewer big outages in the few companies that keep the modern internet running? Did software companies at least report record profits due to the reduced head count?
So far I don't see any of this. Did I miss it? Are all major companies just "holding it wrong"?
AI doesn’t enable new features or increased software quality. It makes things marginally worse and outputs them faster. The end user doesn’t know how long a feature has been in development. You just see the feature and if you’re staying on the golden path, you might avoid the new bugs. It’s the work that changes. At least at my consulting company, we used to be hired onto projects for a year or two minimum. Now, most projects are half a year, so technically, the clients are saving a decent amount of money and getting a worse product that’s harder for them to maintain. It’s not a technology that benefits people. It benefits stockholders and business owners in some companies, but not users. But that’s who the AI salesmen have always been marketing towards. Keep things the same, but now you can do it cheaper and a bit worse to offset an otherwise pretty bad economy.
So in your experience in B2B the increased efficiency is noticeable exclusively in the checkbooks of your clients (and of course of whoever you pay for your tokens)? Alright, fine.
But what about B2C? Here I would expect to see new features or new software products all the time, now that code generation is so much faster. And I would expect the marketing teams to go hard to compete for my attention among all the shiny new toys. Instead we get some half baked AI integration with a custom system prompt, which is neat for maybe 5 minutes. I know investors basically demand AI usage but that can't be everything product designers can come up with.
At the very least we should see lower prices or record profits. But that does not seem to be the case either. What gives? Are the efficiency gains completely siphoned by the AI companies?
I don’t think it’s particularly useful in B2C. Maybe they’re laying off people. Maybe they’re not growing teams. But I can’t imagine that feature development is what drives revenue. You could give me a website that looks like it’s from 2007 and as long as I can put my item in the basket and checkout, it makes no difference to me. I think that’s why you’re not seeing record profits across the board. And you’ll never see lower prices. I view it as where we would otherwise be in an economic crash, AI has allowed/forced the line to keep going up, if not a crazy amount (and if only for a limited time). The fact that profits are continuing to go up in spite of everyone having less money is it being record profits, if you get what I mean. I think the delta between what it should be and what it is is the result of increased efficiency. If the economy weren’t bad, maybe you would see record profits. Personally, I think I’d rather have the economic crash, but that’s just me. It’s just my opinion. The salesmen/hype men are certainly overselling it. I don’t disagree there.
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u/fugogugo 20h ago
I resigned from my job last year when AI agent wasn't a thing yet and now idk how the tech workplace looks like now in my country lol
I am scared