There has always been a gap between the experience of solo/small shop developers, vs. developers who work in teams in a large corporate environment. But thanks to open source, we have for the past twenty years at least mostly all been using the same tools.
But right now, the difference in developer experience between a dev on a team at a business which has corporate copilot or Claude licenses and bosses encouraging them to maximize token usage, vs a solo dev experimenting once every few months with a consumer grade chat model is vast.
Let’s take an extreme example.
Meta seemingly has a constant stream of product managers. If llm’s really augment the productivity of engineers, why isn’t meta launching lots more stuff? I mean there’s no harm in at least launching one new thing.
What are all those people doing with the so called productivity enhancements?
What I’m calling into question is how much does generating more code matter if the bottle neck is creativity/imagination for projects?
The only thing I’ve seen is a really crummy meta AI thing implemented within WhatsApp.
It’s allowed a sludge of internal tools to spin up, and more bloat. The ability to sand bag and over build these tools has gotten 2-10x worse.
Only solution I can think of is to drastically cut headcount so productivity is back to prior levels, and profitability is raised. Big Tech is mostly market constrained with not much room to grow beyond the market itself growing.
As for startups, seems like AI tools have drastically reduced their time to market and accelerated their growth curves.
Forgive my ignorance, but what exactly is the vast difference? Who's doing more of what, or whatever you're implying? And how do you quantify this?
The difference is (if you'll forgive me recruiting a couple of straw men for the purpose of illustrating the spectrum we are talking about here):
Hobbyist solo dev, counting tokens, hitting quotas, trying things on little projects, giving up and not seeing what the fuss is about.
vs
Corporate developer, increasingly held accountable by their boss for hitting metrics for token usage; being handed every new model as soon as it comes out; working with the tools every day on code changes that impact other developers on other teams all of whom have access to those same tools.
Okay, so just to be clear you're not commenting on productivity? Or what does "changes that impact" mean?
I might be missing a lot of self-evident assumptions here but I feel like I'm still missing so much context and have no idea what this difference is actually describing.
If you have some objective measure of productivity in mind, feel free to share it, but no that's not what I'm commenting on.
I'm talking more about why threads like this seem to be full of people saying 'this has completely changed how corporate development works' and other people saying 'I tried it a few times and I don't get the hype'