alt Hacker NewsCan only speak for my own project, but can give an example:
After an aquisition earlier this year I got the task of doing an SAP-Integration for the new company, last time I did this 5 years ago it was a 6 month task, but with the experience and skills ive gained since I estimated it would be a 3 month project (with or without AI, most work is just logistics, AI cant help much there).
In those 3 months I was able to not only integrate SAP but also deliver a completely modernised user-facing software for that integration. While I could have written that software myself in a vacuum it would have never been worth it financially, since it would have delayed the launch of the integration by 6+ months. Building the software post-launch of the integration would have easily taken 2.5 years at minimum.
But this is also basically a "spherical cow in a vacuum" scenario, where I was essentially acting as a solo dev, in full operational control of the project, with deep domain knowledge of the topic and an allready fully set up codebase that I knew perfectly while working down ideas I've had in my backlog for 5+ years.
> Building the software post-launch of the integration would have easily taken 2.5 years at minimum.
What you have said is correct, it lets you build software much faster. The question however is: is that software making money for the company? (Not talking about what you built but in general)
I think, with AI, companies are saying yes to a lot of things they would have said No to ik say 2020. And as a result realizing “just building it” is not the answer.
Previously your GTM team or Product team would say “If we ship some big project X, we unlock $Y in revenue” but now people are realizing that those projections were really more of a hope. So companies are spending so much more tokens and shipping so many more PRs based on hope but a lot of it just doesn’t turn into meaningful revenue, especially not in short term