> When circumstances eventually require that understanding, when something breaks in an unexpected way or requirements change in a way that demands architectural reasoning, the organization discovers the deficit.

Maybe it's because I work in such a small team on a still-starting project, but even with the chaos of LLM-generated code, I can't imagine such a case as above that the LLMs couldn't also address.

Great read though and I appreciated the article.

have you worked in a 10-15 year old codebase? because I honestly doubt that LLMs can cope with that.

For some meaning of cope. I tried that just for the lulz. LLMs do fell like Monty Python's "Tis just a flesh wound". Lulz delivered, I give that.

With the free time gained from not manually writing code, documentation should be part of the workflow. I should start doing this.

Management will demand that free time goes to more features. Thats the problem. Time spent understand the feature (either while writing it or documenting it) is not valued, only time spent making it. So when making and understanding are decoupled, management will demand you spend all your time making, rather than understanding. They'll just tell you to have the llm make the docs

If that is what management wants I’m more than happy to give it to them.

With the free time gained from the advent of fast food people "should" have started exercising more, but they didn't. As disciplined as you yourself may be, the typical person is going to use AI to expend minimal effort and go home at 4:55 pm.

"free time gained" lol in what world is that ever a thing?

I guess we work in very different places!

I'm more inclined to believe your response is an AI-generated one liner if my choices are that or accepting an employer is baking in slack time in response to productivity gains by employees.

you don't think LLM impacts on productivity were a factor at all?

If LLMs really multiply productivity, why would you fire people and handicap the boost?

I have 100 people that can now do the work of 200 people thanks to a new tool.

How is the logical response to fire half of them and bring my productivity back to where it was before?

Because there isn't an unlimited amount of productive work to be done. Sure, a bowling ball factory in a world that demands unlimited bowling balls should take the productivity multiplier AND retain the employees, because they ought to make all the bowling balls they possibly can.

But CashApp jira tickets are not a bowling ball factory in a world with unlimited bowling ball demand. At a certain point, you're just paying people to sit around, or even worse, pretend they're busy.

That’s my point. The letter claims this is a decision made for the purpose of growth, which makes no sense.

This is admitting the company is in maintenance mode at best

> If LLMs really multiply productivity, why would you fire people and handicap the boost?

Presumably, because some of these areas are cost centers versus profit generating.

He explains the rationale, smaller teams work faster.

we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.

This is just rephrasing the same concept.

Claiming than a small group with AI can accomplish more than a large group with AI doesn’t make sense.

More likely the company doesn’t have enough work for the large group.

Have you worked at a big company? It makes sense to me that a small group would be much more productive than a large group, even without AI. Throw in some AI help, and it could be much better.

> It makes sense to me that a small group would be much more productive than a large group

That's not the scenario. The scenario is a large group vs a large group cut into a small group.

The chaos and disruption of slicing 1/2 the company would more than offset any gains. We got people. Not machines. Not everyone adapts so fast. Team work and efficiencies take time.

I do see fewer Square terminals these days, more Toast (and other options too I think).

He’s been building tech companies for 20 years, he sure knew smaller teams move faster when he was hiring thousands of more people during covid

Demand inelasticity.

> our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers

I would say the vast majority of people in this thread don't believe that this is related to AI at all, other than as a pretext. It's kind of incredible.

As in AI is a belief? This isn't a religion. IF things don't add up they don't.

For real. Very worried about when other CEOs follow suit and there is a flood of people into unemployment.

Square payment processing?

Which ones have you compared it against?

Literally all of them: https://github.com/rcarmo/agentbox

Very interesting definition of "all of them" :)

https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Arcarmo%2Fagentbox%20codex...

No, literally. Mistral, Gemini, opencode, everything supported by Toad, etc. I’ve tried them all. I just don’t like using either Claude Code or Codex, so I didn’t add them to agentbox and stuck with Copilot because it gives me both OpenAI and Anthropic models.

Before Pi, I actually preferred Mistral Vibe’s UX

Ok, maybe we need to establish what "literally" means before we try to figure out "all of them" it seems...

I was curious about your project, but the sloppy usage of even the most basic terms kind of makes me not to want to dive deeper, how could I even trust it does what it says on the tin, if apparently we don't even have a shared vocabulary?

You're an AI, right? Because a human would come across as crass with that statement...

Who are your competitors? What makes you different?

I actually did not find any competitor in this space. There is no platform which analyze comment or where every post is interactive.

I don't have a macro-level answer for you but an interesting anecdote: we opened a job for a Software Designer and looked at the first 9 applicants. All of them were in need of H-1B sponsorship, most were Indian, and most were "software-engineers-turned-designers". So at a micro (company) level, we hire immigrants because those are the candidates we receive.

Note: One of my parents is an Indian immigrant. I have worked with many great Indian engineers and many not-so-great, just like every other nationality.

It's a great post, I will use it for the same. Thank you.

what do you mean?