HobbitFoot

I read an Economist article about the expected impact of AI on worker productivity and it found a major bifurcation of impacts.

If AI output could be trusted as is, productivity gains mainly went to less productive workers as they were able to benefit the most from a tool doing the hard parts of the job. This could reduce wages since you can lower job requirements by using AI.

If AI output needed human processing and review, productivity gains mainly went to high performers as they were able to benefit the most from a tool doing the easy parts of the job. This could reduce employment as high performers can do more by using AI.

Spotify would have to pay for added functionality. AI slop comes for free.

But that isn’t caring about your stack beyond that your stack isn’t shit.

Yeah, but a lot of the discussion has been about those companies given how well they pay and how dominant they are in the industry.

We’re at a point of effective monopoly and vastly increased costs of creating competition.

The spigot of free money has been turned off, so most projects today need to have a planned out ROI, which is why enshitification has become such a big thing recently. Improvement for competition sake is out the door unless the incumbent is weak or a jump is needed as the existing revenue stream is collapsing.

But no one is flying Southwest for a best in class experience. It doesn’t have to be a great system to use, just a system that does the bare minimum.

Is there really a need to extend functionality like there was 10 years ago?

Twitter and Tumblr are operating on skeleton crews but are able to make changes.

Craigslist is still around even though it hasn’t changed much since the '90’s.

There is an entire industry of companies that buy old MMO’S and maintain them at a low cost for a few remaining players.

Southwest Airlines still runs ticketing on a Windows 95 server.

I think you’ll see more companies accept managed decline as a business strategy.

I’m not saying you can fire everyone, but the maintenance team doesn’t need to be the size of the development team if the goal is to only maintain features.

Most extension today is enshitification. We’ve also seen major platforms scale to the size of Earth.

If you’re only going to maintain and don’t have a plan on adding features outside of duct taping AI to the software, what use is it maintaining a dev team at the size you needed it to be when creating new code?

I don’t know. I look at it like firing all your construction contractors after built out all your stores in a city. You might need some construction trades to maintain your stores and your might need to relocate a store every once in a while, but you don’t need the same construction staff on had as you did with the initial build out.