AI productivity gains are closer to 10% than 10x

29 pointsposted 6 hours ago
by champagnepapi

24 Comments

mycentstoo

5 hours ago

My unsolicited thoughts:

* AI will drive additional features as development accelerates

* There will be a window where fast adopting AI companies can deliver features faster than peers

* Those fast adopting AI companies will be able to garner additional revenue

* Gap closes as AI benefits slow in their impact to feature development and slower adopting companies catch up

* Companies that were faster adopters can no longer charge more for additional revenue without giving up market share to now caught-up competitors

* New normal is that companies are in a bind - they have to pay for tokens/AI aided development else they lose speed and therefore market share - but the paying is now without additional revenue and exists as a tax

Assumptions:

* No AGI

* LLMs have bounded impact on features

* Timeframe is long enough that companies that trail in AI won't be starved out

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iVHmp9F4Rl0

discreteevent

5 hours ago

> There will be a window where fast adopting AI companies can deliver features faster than peers >Those fast adopting AI companies will be able to garner additional revenue

The companies going 50% slower on reliable features that customers want to pay for will continue to wipe the floor with the hyper productive companies producing fluff.

cyanydeez

2 hours ago

* AI will drive 10x bike shedding for 90% of the consumers diluting any real speed up, except the one...autist.

maleero

6 hours ago

10% seems low. I think 1.5-3x is more like it without sacrificing quality. You can easily go 10x if you don’t care about the results too much.

whateveracct

2 hours ago

3x? a year of work in 4 months?

it's almost August - companies should have two years of progress since Jan 1 2026.

Tagbert

5 hours ago

There are probably larger gains in some areas like testing and coding. other areas, less so as they depend on messy data. I can tell you that only some areas of project management benefit from AI. the rest is more of a people problem.

smcg

4 hours ago

unless AI also speeds up the 84% of work that isn't coding, that is not possible.

watwut

5 hours ago

> You can easily go 10x if you don’t care about the results too much.

People are also much faster when they dont care about quality at all.

satvikpendem

3 hours ago

Not really. There's a limit to how much you can focus on and literally type, even caring little about quality.

watwut

3 hours ago

You dont need to focus if you dont care about quality. Overworked teams do it all the time.

satvikpendem

an hour ago

You need to make sure the text you're typing actually compiles into a working program, so there is some degree of focus required. Compare that with vibe coding, just type a sentence of what you want and it does everything itself with no continued focus from you. The degree is completely different.

type0

2 hours ago

> if you don’t care about the results too much.

if you like slop

horticulturist

4 hours ago

The variation in individual developer throughput was as much as 20x pre-AI. 10% is basically nothing. You’d be better off firing your worst performer and replacing them with someone good (or great).

user

5 hours ago

[deleted]

mytailorisrich

6 hours ago

AI has the potential to be extremely powerful but it is also very new. People and organisations are just at the beginning of the learning process.

goatlover

6 hours ago

Sure but the hype has been about the 10x productivity increases and how less employees are needed. Also all the AGI/singularity stuff being just around the corner, not simply AI potentially making employees a lot more productive.

UltraSane

5 hours ago

10% is still huge.

discreteevent

5 hours ago

10% in profit is huge but that's not what the article is about.

UltraSane

3 hours ago

A 10% increase to total labor productivity would be huge. It would add trillions to global GDP.

smcg

4 hours ago

it's much lower than common claims about AI.

UltraSane

3 hours ago

Bit it would still add trillions to global GDP

simianwords

5 hours ago

This is very similar to how you can double the employees in a company and only get marginal improvement in productivity.

If that’s true, AI gives the same gains doubling labour. No?

jimz12

29 minutes ago

If you don’t get return on productivity then you cut and get savings

Kuyawa

2 hours ago

How long it takes for a seasoned developer to write a full app with database design, full authentication register/login/logout/forgot/session, basic crud for all entities, payment processing, admin dashboard with analytics, recent users, transactions, moderation, etc

Usually from 1 to 3 months

Now it all can be developed in just 5 mins, add cosmetic changes in just 24 hours and you have a fully functioning app already deployed in production

So if that doesn't make you a 10X developer you are not using enough AI