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Here's how I'd explain it. In response to AI, there are three types of developers/companies:

  • Reduce dev hours in response
  • Maintain dev hours in response
  • Increase dev hours in response

The logic and effects in the product market are as follows:

  • Reduce dev hours -> Maintain product quality/quantity
  • Maintain dev hours -> Increase product quality/quantity (due to higher productivity)
  • Increase dev hours -> Increase product quality/quantity by a lot

We don't know the distribution of what companies will choose, so in terms of how it affects the dev labor market, the impact of AI is pretty ambiguous.

But the impact on product output and quality is unambiguous -- it will increase.

One thing that both @optimism and I predict is that AI will unleash a lot of bespoke software. You can think of this as an increase in product quality (better fit to needs). In terms of the labor market, if the company hires more in-house devs or turns non-devs into devs, that could be thought of as an increase in the dev labor market. If they drop a contract that supported 5 devs and gave the work to 1 in-house dev, that would be a decrease.

My friend was complaining about the increase in the use of “bespoke”

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It's because somewhere in the 90s, the trend was started to pay JD Edwards or SAP a couple million and then you "had to do what the system told you". No, you do not put your pallet in bay "A1" because the algo says you put it in bay "D7". These things were possible because the rocket scientists working on the algo were centralized and you bought their software and you won more by doing what they thought best. You couldn't build this on your own cost-effectively.

Now you can.

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ERP was such a rip off, a total fucking racket/boondoggle

edit:
I always knew it but I could not prove it!

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I've worked with and without it. The upside of being a stubborn mf and sticking with best-of-breed has been that you didn't need to hire a team of PWC dudes to get something customized. The downside was that you'd still be vendor locked.

That's changed now but I fear it will take a while for businesses to wake up to this new shiny future of burned out solo devs, a $20k Anthropic bill and half finished software. lol

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20k is trivial

I think it's more like 200k

edit: PWC = Price Waterhouse Cunts?

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If you spend more than 20k on a software implementation before it can be shipped, you have been doing it wrong regardless, I think.

Many years ago one of my team leads said: "if we cannot do it in 3 sprints, we cannot do it". Which roughly translates to "1 week" of API expenditure now; not including refinement.

PWC = Price Waterhouse Cunts?

Yeah or fill in your own. It's a placeholder.

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