I know that yc by virtue of being a startup incubator has a noticeable pro-AI bias, and this naturally influences hn as well.
That said, there's definitely some influence, and not only on development. Teams are shrinking not only due to the economy, there's a real pressure to deliver more with less, and AI has raised expectations all around.
- (hw) Hardware issues can be debugged and worked around by an amateur (like yours truly) at home, meaning you no longed need to pay to fix lots of things yourself;
- (dev) refactoring and rewrites are not as expensive as before, meaning no need for dedicated teams and processes, and _some_ businesses (not all) chose to turn that into budget optimization ("doing the same work with less team", instead of "doing more work with the same team")
- (media) you can generate a decent 1 minute SaaS landing page product video for 20 bucks and and openRouter key, meaning less need to rely on or shop for specialized marketing/media service.
And the list just goes on an on. We're in the big pressure cooker of history as usual, but this is one of those occasions where the temperature is rising really fast due to AI and the further commoditization of a lot of workflows that were career specialties yesterday.
Edit: a killed post below mentions interviews now valuing system design knowledge (like tradeoffs, cost etc) instead of rote memorization (since the need for encyclopedic knowledge arguably hit an all time low). This shows the change in the median profile businesses and recruiting staff are after, certainly influenced by AI.
That said, there's definitely some influence, and not only on development. Teams are shrinking not only due to the economy, there's a real pressure to deliver more with less, and AI has raised expectations all around.
- (hw) Hardware issues can be debugged and worked around by an amateur (like yours truly) at home, meaning you no longed need to pay to fix lots of things yourself;
- (dev) refactoring and rewrites are not as expensive as before, meaning no need for dedicated teams and processes, and _some_ businesses (not all) chose to turn that into budget optimization ("doing the same work with less team", instead of "doing more work with the same team")
- (media) you can generate a decent 1 minute SaaS landing page product video for 20 bucks and and openRouter key, meaning less need to rely on or shop for specialized marketing/media service.
And the list just goes on an on. We're in the big pressure cooker of history as usual, but this is one of those occasions where the temperature is rising really fast due to AI and the further commoditization of a lot of workflows that were career specialties yesterday.
Edit: a killed post below mentions interviews now valuing system design knowledge (like tradeoffs, cost etc) instead of rote memorization (since the need for encyclopedic knowledge arguably hit an all time low). This shows the change in the median profile businesses and recruiting staff are after, certainly influenced by AI.