Posted by delichon 6 hours ago
Both types expect you to spend as many tokens as possible so that the AI bubble doesn't burst (presumably because leadership has a financial interest in this).
Your actual productivity isn't important. If you point out that you're much faster writing code on your own in 90% of cases, you will be told you're not good at AI, you're not prompting it correctly and that generally you're not AI-native and that you'll be left behind. To be precise, token usage is a performance metric, so you'll be let go if Claude is not running continuously 8 hours a day.
I'd like to know how many places have mandates to write 100% of your code using AI, as well as to max out your AI agent's plan. For some reason nobody talks about it even though I know several companies around the world that are forcing this on their employees.
If you're looking for a job then you don't have a choice, it's better to have an income. But if you're looking to change jobs to get away from AI to actually be productive and gain experience then it's a very bad job market.
[edit 25 years not 20]
I'm searching for a job for many months, and I do see the uptick quite clearly.
Fashion is when developers jump on the next web framework because they got bored of the old one.
But when you get fired for not enough token usage, that's something else. When bosses start demanding you write 100% of your code using AI, and then a few months later Anthropic reports 30% increase in usage, that's not fashion. People who invested in AI are putting a lot of pressure on developers to ensure their investment pays off.
Token billing is coming very-very soon, there won't be a "plan".
What will these companies do then?
Unavoidable AI-based productivity growth, in software and in all the other industries, will lead to the software, specifically AI in this case, not just eating the wold, it would be devouring it. Such AI revolution will mean even more need for software engineers, just like the Personal Computer revolution and the Internet revolution did in their times. Of course the software engineering will get changed like it did in those previous revolutions.
There is no productivity growth attributed to AI. In fact, serious attempts to measure AI performance show that even if AI makes some code entry tasks faster, total product delivery times are, in fact, increased.
(This should be obvious once you realize coding AIs are technical debt generation machines.)
I think we've gone beyond anecdotal evidence of experience engineers finding true value in this new tech. It may not have registered yet, but skilled people are unequivocally finding value in these tools.
I agree that we have yet to settle down on the true costs involved (which will probably end up at "slightly less than a junior engineer" or something like that) - but we are months beyond the idea that it's all smoke and mirrors and no one is getting value out of it.
- AI will replace all workers (unlikely today) - AI speeds up programming (yes today)
Sure, whatever. That would be anecdotal evidence.
I think we are past the point where we can just dismiss their input - these new tools do legitimately add value, it appears.