Of course they are. The two things aren’t contradictory at all, in fact one strongly implies the other. If AI is writing 90% of your code, that means the total contribution of a developer is 10× the code they would write without AI. This means you get way more value per developer, so why wouldn’t you keep hiring developers?

This idea that “AI writes 90% of our code” means you don’t need developers seems to spring from a belief that there is a fixed amount of software to produce, so if AI is doing 90% of it then you only need 10% of the developers. So far, the world’s appetite for software is insatiable and every time we get more productive, we use the same amount of effort to build more software than before.

The point at which Anthropic will stop hiring developers is when AI meets or exceeds the capabilities of the best human developers. Then they can just buy more servers instead of hiring developers. But nobody is claiming AI is capable of that so far, so of course they are going to capitalise on their productivity gains by hiring more developers.

If AI is making developers (inside Anthropic or out) 10x more productive... where's all the software?

I'm not an LLM luddite, they are useful tools, but people with vested interests make a lot of claims that if they were true would result in a situation where we should already be seeing the signs of a giant software renaissance... and I just haven't seen that. Like, at all.

I see a lot more blogging and influncer peddling about how AI is going to change everything than I do any actual signs of AI changing much of anything.

How much software do you think happened at Google internally during its first 10 years of existence that never saw outside light? I imagine that they have a lot of internal projects that we have no idea they even need.

But this AI boom is supposedly lifting all boats, internal and external.

That's the hype being sold. So where's the software...?

And again, I'm not anti-LLM. But I still think the hype around them is far, far greater than their real impact.

See Jevons paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

You said:

> The two things aren’t contradictory at all, in fact one strongly implies the other. If AI is writing 90% of your code, that means the total contribution of a developer is 10× the code they would write without AI. This means you get way more value per developer, so why wouldn’t you keep hiring developers?

Let's review the original claim:

> AI will replace 90% of developers within 6 months

Notice that the original claim does not say "developers will remain the same amount, they will just be 10x more effective". It says the opposite of what you claim it says. The word "replace" very clearly implies loss of job.

> Let's review the original claim:

> > AI will replace 90% of developers within 6 months

That’s not the original claim though; that’s a misrepresentative paraphrase of the original claim, which was that AI will be writing 90% of the code with a developer driving it.

Huh. You seem to be right. It seems I was responding to a comment which misquoted Dario.