i'm not sure i buy the long-term "*90% productivity*" claims for complex, legacy enterprise systems, but for the boilerplate, libraries, build-tools, and refactoring? the gain is gigantic. all the time-consuming, nerve-wrecking stuff is mostly taken care of.
you start off checking every diff like a hawk, expecting it to break things, but honestly, soon you see it's not necessary most of the time. you just keep your IDE open and feed the "analyze code" output back into it. in java, telling it to "add checkstyle, run mvn verify and repair" works well enough that you can actually go grab a coffee instead of fighting linter warnings.
the theory is that what remains is just the logic and ideas. we'll see how that holds up when the architecture gets genuinely tangled. but for now, letting it branch off, create boilerplate, and write a simple test while you just iterate on the spec works shockingly well. you only write source code when it's too annoying to write down the spec in plain english.
it raises the real question: if your competitor Y just fired 90% of their developers to save a buck, would you blindly follow suit? or would you keep your team, use this massive leverage, and just *dwarf* Y with a vastly better product?
On the tech side I see it saving some time with stuff like mock data creation, writing boiler plate, etc. You still have to review it like it's a junior. You still have to think about the requirements and design to provide a detailed understanding to them (AI or junior).
I don't think either of these will provide 90% productivity gains. Maybe 25-50% depending on the job.
I'm not sure what your circumstances are but even if it's not true for you, it's true for many other people.
People online with identical views they all assure me that theyre all highly skilled.
not talking about toys or vibecoded crap no one uses.
Seniors can adjust, but eg. junior frontend-only devs might be doomed in both situations, as they might not be able to contribute enough to business-critical features to justify their costs and most frontend-related tasks will be taken over by the "10x" seniors.
Another way of increasing profit is to simply reduce your headcount by 90% while keeping the same profit.*
Hence, I think some companies will keep downsizing. Some companies will hire. It depends a lot.
*Assuming 90% productivity increase.
Is it the same with tech? Facebook has 3 billion monthly active users. No amount of tech will bring that up to 6 billion. If you were to double the amount of time someone spends on Facebook, or double the ads they see or double the click through rate, what does that really mean?
Remember sometimes the most productive thing to have is not money or people but time with your ideas.
you hire more if you are growth and have new ideas just never had the chance to implement them as they were not practical of feasible at that level of tech (non-assisted humans clicking code and taking sick leaves)
Terafab is suddenly making so much sense!