jrowilliams

I've been thinking about this, and I think it's complicated. While AI agents make prototyping/PoC-ing and turning ideas into something concrete so much quicker - a valuable part of growing a business and finding investors/customers etc. - there's a certain type of business that I can see being neutered due to these advances.

Software contractors/freelancers are going to be in a difficult spot. Before it was their convenience that allowed for a higher hourly rate, but now it's just as convenient to throw your pre-existing team at the problem - as not having knowledge of a specific tech stack is no longer as prohibitive as it once was

There's definitely something to be said for trying to keep hysteria to a minimum

The latter, our company is replacing tools we used to pay for with bespoke software.

Another interesting one is the hosting of the open source equivalents of SaaS products on on-prem hardware. Turns out that agents take very well to infrastructure-as-code setups, making managing deployments of software far less work than it used to be. So we can use X database (albeit an older and less feature-rich version) on our own infrastructure that we can easily scale/tailor to our needs without paying for the enterprise SaaS version

> I do think a number of SaaS tools might be in more trouble if companies decide to just build in-house alternatives that are custom for their exact needs. But perhaps SaaS will adapt to "source available" or some other kind of way to allow easier extension of their core offering so that companies just build a sidecar or thin layer over the core that covers their needs better than a "one size fits all" SaaS ever could.

Very good point, something that I've encountered at my company already.

I get the feeling the vast number of people already in a manager role (who are not techincally grounded) will not be able to understand the benefit of allowing SWEs to step into that role, as opposed to taking on that role themselves.

I would be interested to hear from juniors + new grads tbh. They're definitely the ones most immediately impacted by this

> Software teams are capturing a lot of the speedup in the form of more leisure or quasi-leisure time. (To greatly simplify: software teams are offering 2x speedups to their companies. They're then using tools that allow them to work 10x as efficiently, and taking nice long coffee breaks.)

I am yet to see the advancements in AI manifest in more leisure-time. It is simply that the amount of work we're expected to be able to pump out has increased, and the actual programming work is no longer what slows us down.