Block — the company behind Square, Afterpay and Cash App.
Since it’s not in the headline
Writing code never has been and never will be the bottleneck. What we’re finding is that the actual bottlenecks come under a lot more pressure from all the code that is being produced.
Of course, in this case the actual operational capabilities are vastly less important than what the c-suite believes to be true, or at least what they want to protect to their shareholders.
If people can’t explain what they want their software to do to another person, how do they expect a regurgitation machine prone to hallucinations and trained on Stack Overflow questions to get it right?
Writing code never has been and never will be the bottleneck.
YES! I recently completed two code-heavy projects at work. My bosses kept asking me if I could use more AI to get the project done faster… and I kept telling them no! The bottleneck wasn’t my typing speed. The bottleneck was me thinking through the design, thinking about edge cases, running experiments to validate hypothesis, testing out different API designs.
Typing out the code took like 1 day out of the 2 weeks. Code generation is not the bottleneck.
OK, this is a general thought that I’d had many years ago, and doesn’t necessarily relate to this article specifically, but I thought I’d mention it.
One of the trickier things to do is cut your workforce. In a lot of cases what you want to do and what you legally may be able to do are not be the same thing. Often you need a plausible reason to do so.
Arguably, AI provides that plausible reason.
Also cuts costs without spooking investors.
Exactly, makes a company in decline sound CUTTING EDGE.
AI is absolutely being used as a pretext to cut jobs. They’ll axe 1000, say “oh whoops that was a mistake” and hire 500 back.
