Software teams are capturing a lot of the speedup in the form of more leisure or quasi-leisure time. (To greatly simplify: software teams are offering 2x speedups to their companies. They’re then using tools that allow them to work 10x as efficiently, and taking nice long coffee breaks.)

There’s an important flip side to this, which is the actual mental model overhead.

Unless you’re doing slop, you’ll need to think about your code. That 2-3x speedup might actually be the limit of your cognition, at least in matters of direct human-on-keyboard work for your employer. Those coffee breaks are necessary, and sometimes downright essential.

For the rest of the post - pretty much (a bit of) all of the above. I’ve conjectured that we’ll have far more smaller software and abandon SaaS that isn’t exceptional, and it seems to be happening. I’ve seen a fair few overblown SaaS companies needing to scale down.

I, personally, have coded (assisted with LLMs) a few personal services. I’m not overly motivated to publish them widely or spend marketing/sales budget, but it was fun and brings me utility every day. Can’t complain about the impact of LLM software on myself. Services I use daily, though, don’t seem as improved as I’d enjoy.

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