alt Hacker NewsAnother aspect I haven’t seen discussed too much is that if your competitor is 10x more productive with AI, and to stay relevant you also use AI and become 10x more productive. Does the business actually grow enough to justify the extra expense? Or are you pretty much in the same state as you were without AI, but you are both paying an AI tax to stay relevant?
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The alternative is probably also true. If your F500 competitor is also handicapped by AI somehow, then you're all stagnant, maybe at different levels. Meanwhile Anthropic is scooping up software engineers it supposedly made irrelevant with Mythos and moving into literally 2+ new categories per quarter
Where's the evidence of competitors being 10x more productive? So far, everyone is simply bragging about how much code they have shipped last week, but that has zero relevance when it comes to productivity
it's worse than a tie. 10x everyone just floods the market and tanks per-unit price. you pay the AI tax and your output is worth less.
If the business doesn’t grow then you shed costs like employees
Either the business grows, or the market participants shed human headcount to find the optimal profit margin. Isn’t that the great unknown: what professions are going to see headcount reduction because demand can’t grow that fast (like we’ve seen in agriculture), and which will actually see headcount stay the same or even expand, because the market has enough demand to keep up with the productivity gains of AI? Increasingly I think software writ large is the latter, but individual segments in software probably are the former.
> your competitor is 10x more productive with AI
This doesn't happen. Literally zero evidence of this.
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This is the “ad tax” reasoning, but ultimately I think the answer is greater efficiency. So there is a real value, even if all competitors use the tools.
It’s like saying clothing manufacturers are paying the “loom tax” tax when they could have been weaving by hand…