> An engineer with AI tool can now outbuild a 100-person engineering team.
What an insane statement. If the tooling improves that much the team of 100 will also improve. A worker with a shovel only outperforms the other workers if they’re still digging with sticks.
That sets aside the assumption that a few years from now we’ll see any material improvement at all. More likely we’ll see more wasted hype on some new revolution.
Yeah I really don’t get why people keep hyping AI like this. It really doesn’t make things go that much faster. At best you’re able to generate prototypes more quickly + get better autocomplete. Nothing particularly revolutionary there.
Anyone claiming a generalized 100x, 10x, or even 2x productivity gain is either delusional or trying to sell you something. Possibly both.
The companies saying they are reducing the size of their workforce because of gains they’re getting from AI are probably just telling investors what they want to hear while cutting costs for the same reason they always have.
I felt this way until Claude Code. It works much, much better in large codebases than anything else I've tried. It implements smaller features, including ones with FE + API changes and tests for each, pretty well. I'm going to try cloning our main repo multiple times to get it working on multiple branches at once.
>Anyone claiming a generalized 100x, 10x, or even 2x productivity gain is either delusional or trying to sell you something
I don't understand how anyone who spends a couple hours or more per day coding new functionality couldn't at least double their productivity with LLMs, unless their organisation prohibits LLM usage. Even just limiting the LLM to writing unit tests would still save that much time.
Author of the post here. We’re a 4-member team running 4 products with 4,500+ paying customers. No sales team, no infrastructure team - just freemium and serverless computing (Firebase) doing the heavy lifting. I’ve been a developer and founder for 20+ years, and I know that 15 years ago, each product would’ve required at least a 30-member team to build, maintain, and sell. This isn’t hypothetical, it already happened to us.
Most of this leverage comes from internet distribution (freemium) and cloud computing (serverless), not AI. (Though we do use AI to answer support questions—since my cofounder is the only one handling them.) Now with AI, I argue that a solo engineer could outbuild a 100-member team in a couple of years. Given how much productivity has already increased, why is that an insane claim?
They clearly don't mean one person with AI now vs. 100 people with AI now. They're comparing one person with AI now to 100 people without AI before.
Regardless, one person still costs 1/100 as much as 100 people. Let's say each of the 100 adopts AI and multiplies their productivity by 100. Does their company need its total engineering productivity multiplied by 100? They might settle for let's say 3X and save 97% of the costs by firing 97 people.
(I tend to ignore most of the hype and I'm dubious about that 100X figure, but I'm taking it at face value here for illustrative purposes.)
OP here. While this logic holds, large companies don’t move fast.
In 2018, I wrote about scaling big while staying small using serverless computing (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/scale-big-while-s...). But by 2020, instead of leaner teams, we saw more hiring and even bigger orgs—ironically, even at companies selling serverless services.
Why? Because incentives at large companies favor empire-building (prestige from managing big teams) over efficiency. I expect the same inertia with AI: solo devs will fully embrace AI, serverless, and freemium to race ahead, while big teams will adopt AI at a crawl.
Even if that’s what they mean (and I agree, that’s plausible, though not obvious) it’s still an asinine statement in the context of their broader thesis: advancements in generative AI are going to power the rise of the solopreneur. In absolute terms, an individual developer may be more productive in 3 years than they are today, but in relative terms, they will still be underpowered when compared to large teams building complex software. It only makes sense if we also assume the consumer and quality bar of today as well — and I don’t think LLMs are expected to crack time travel.
There will still be successful solopreneurs, just as there are today, but the idea that tooling-based productivity gains for individual developers are going to drive a power shift towards solo development and away from team-based companies is stupid.
Great. So a team of 100 with LLMs is still faster than a team of 100 without even if they spend the same amount of time on synchronization? Or did I miss something here?
If 1 person can use an excavator/AI, then a 100 person crew can use 100 excavators/AIs. Capabilities have increased for everyone, not just for 1 man operations.
In my experience, team efficiency does not improve linearly with head count. A 100-person team may be 2 or 3 times more productive than a 10-person team. Collaboration efforts (process, bureaucracy, calls, meetings, mails, chats) increase exponentially with larger teams. AI can help with coding but not much with this collaboration process, at least not yet. Now, AI can make a small team much more productive because their collaboration overhead stays the same. But AI cannot help with a 100 person team because their collective collaboration overhead cannot be solved by AI. I guess the trend will move towards smaller sized teams that can effectively use AI.
Depends on if you think AI is more like a shovel or an excavator. The article to me implies a shovel: a tool used by one person to increase individual productivity. An excavator is not run by a single worker — it’s run by a team. If AI assisted coding is an excavator, a solo developer won’t outperform a 100 person dev team, because they won’t be able to operate the AI tooling efficiently or effectively.
>First, the internet killed the need for sales teams (distribution moved online).
Sales and marketing is still 90% of the game. The solopreneur still doesn’t have an easy way to get paying customers. Either you sell SaaS into a network of business contacts, or else you try to play the influencer / reddit / SEO game to get early traction.
To add to this, while this approach may work for long tail, transactional sales with low ACVs, and work very well, it will not work for larger strategic/enterprise deals.
Sales teams are alive and well in this area. I’ve been in GTM for nearly my entire career. I have yet to see a company closing 6+ figure deals on a credit card and without a relationship.
As a career proposal specialist, I’m in complete agreement with you. Large deals take significant pursuit and documentation…at the Fortune level enterprise or for regional / state-level agreements in the US, it’s a highly competitive process. I’ve seen this first hand in SaaS sales for municipal clients and it’s simply a cost of doing business for certain markets. AI can’t be trusted with proposal responses that may be catastrophic in the contract phase.
Relationship may be secondary in a large SaaS company (you may see new key account once a year or two), but 6 figures mean paying by invoice, custom discounts and there will be inevitably some KYC process. CEO or CCO can do it and in boutique business they do it, but you probably cannot have lots of customers AND such deals at the same time.
A lot of bold statements unsupported by data or even sufficiently deep understanding of the mentioned things.
Like for example this:
> Formfacade is a CRM that competes with HubSpot
It is not a CRM system and it is far from addressing the needs of users of real CRMs. Of course, an early stage startup or a business with less than 1000 customers can handle leads in Google Forms. But that is a lot to handle.
AI does not replace software engineering. It can enhance productivity on certain types of tasks, but AI is doing terrible job on something that mildly deviates from SO answers. It cannot build something like CRM or anything with rich domain.
It is absolutely possible to go solo today, but it’s not because of AI. Tech founder can just write a lot of good code. Business founder won’t get past outsourced no-code solution.
Author of the post here. This is a misunderstanding of CRM given how customer relationships have evolved over the last 20 years. Salesforce didn’t copy Siebel - it moved sales tracking to the cloud. HubSpot didn’t copy Salesforce - it focused on inbound leads.
We’re not trying to build every feature of a traditional CRM. We’re focusing on Google Forms as CRM for SMBs because they already use Forms + Sheets to manage leads. Wrote another post explaining how we use it as a CRM - https://manidoraisamy.com/developer-forever/post/can-you-use...
I'm not sure how I feel about the take on "disappearing pillars". I think that knowledge and expertise in the different "pillars" the author describes has become easier to access, reducing the moat around the individual pillars and allowing greater overlap between professions. So while you might not need a "sales team", you do need "sales knowledge". Cloud solutions are amazing until they are not and you need "infra knowledge" to understand where you are going wrong and to evaluate potential solutions.
I would argue that at a given size, scale, and growth you would find yourself looping back to the "original pillars".
The example of Neartail[1] competing with Shopify is a prime example of this. Shopify has a large market cap, shareholders demanding profits, a large quantity of paying customers. Neartail has none of these, it may have paying customers and it may have some potential in the future but it is currently all within the sphere of control of a few individuals.
Obviously a lot of what I'm saying is self-inflicted, you don't _have_ to grow endlessly but if you _do_ you need many decision makers and domain knowledge simply starts to reach limits for individuals (even when using AI).
I've been validating this sentiment almost every day.
I left my job last year, after over a decade leading design and UX for iOS at Google, to pursue building a bootstrapped solopreneur startup, and the speed at which I've been able to build things out has been wild.
There are entire domains that would have taken weeks or months for me to learn the ins-and-outs of the tech, that Claude has been able to knock out in a matter of minutes. It's like I have two full time junior engineers working with me at all times (with a similar amount of coaching + guidance required), and for $20/month. These are gains of easily 2x-10x productivity and I already consider myself to be fairly productive as a design engineer.
Keep in mind, switching from Google to startup without AI should get you a 2-10x productivity gain just from lack of bureaucracy alone. But I do agree LLMs are at their best when teaching you subjects you have adjacent knowledge in.
"For example, the future of CRM isn’t just software—it’s software + sales team. Startups that don’t want to hire salespeople will eagerly adopt AI-driven CRMs that automate outreach, and follow-ups."
I'm not involved in either side of this part of the business. Doesn't this read as "smarter spam"? Does that result in long-term customers?
Perhaps I'm just not aware of just how down-and-dirty the top of the funnel is?
My emotional response is: If you don't value _my_ time (as the customer), why should I consider your product?
As software engineer jobs get culled (citing the excuse of AI), I strongly urge experienced senior software engineers to flip the game, becoming AI-assisted solopreneurs instead. If you're sufficiently intelligent, you don't even need VC money to bootstrap it. Here are some income models:
Service:
1. pay-by-use
2. subscription
Software:
1. open-source with paid new feature development
2. sales (on app stores)
Physical products:
1: Resell from China in West
2. Develop new from China/anywhere and sell globally. Let big sites like Amazon and Walmart do the marketing and fulfillment.
Payment or funding models have never been the problem. Those are menus you choose from, not tricky parts you have to come up with from scratch. Thinking of a single product idea I feel has enough chance to succeed to be worth working on, is the entire problem.
After 25 years of never once thinking of one, I doubt that's going to change.
Seriously? Payment and funding are what matter when you are self-bootstrapped, wanting to make an income, and not intending to sell your company (to someone who will likely just destroy it). If instead you want VCs to own you, or intend to not turn a profit, then payment and funding don't matter.
This is crazy how fast you can build things today. But you need to understand what AI is spitting out and make decisions what to include, what to reject and how to ask it to create things. Ironically, this is almost like you would talk to your employees to make things for you.
Yes, you must be able to recognize the right answers and separate them from the hallucinations and crappy engineering.
Maybe it’ll get to a point where even people who don’t have a clue can click Apply and never have to worry, but it’s not quite there yet.
If it does get there, I’ll find another occupation; it’s not like my job ever defined me as a person.
Readit News
What an insane statement. If the tooling improves that much the team of 100 will also improve. A worker with a shovel only outperforms the other workers if they’re still digging with sticks.
That sets aside the assumption that a few years from now we’ll see any material improvement at all. More likely we’ll see more wasted hype on some new revolution.
Anyone claiming a generalized 100x, 10x, or even 2x productivity gain is either delusional or trying to sell you something. Possibly both.
The companies saying they are reducing the size of their workforce because of gains they’re getting from AI are probably just telling investors what they want to hear while cutting costs for the same reason they always have.
I don't understand how anyone who spends a couple hours or more per day coding new functionality couldn't at least double their productivity with LLMs, unless their organisation prohibits LLM usage. Even just limiting the LLM to writing unit tests would still save that much time.
I understand you are focused freemium as a goto market strategy with no dedicated sales or marketing team members.
What tools are you displacing (e.g. Excel)?
Regardless, one person still costs 1/100 as much as 100 people. Let's say each of the 100 adopts AI and multiplies their productivity by 100. Does their company need its total engineering productivity multiplied by 100? They might settle for let's say 3X and save 97% of the costs by firing 97 people.
(I tend to ignore most of the hype and I'm dubious about that 100X figure, but I'm taking it at face value here for illustrative purposes.)
In 2018, I wrote about scaling big while staying small using serverless computing (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/scale-big-while-s...). But by 2020, instead of leaner teams, we saw more hiring and even bigger orgs—ironically, even at companies selling serverless services.
Why? Because incentives at large companies favor empire-building (prestige from managing big teams) over efficiency. I expect the same inertia with AI: solo devs will fully embrace AI, serverless, and freemium to race ahead, while big teams will adopt AI at a crawl.
There will still be successful solopreneurs, just as there are today, but the idea that tooling-based productivity gains for individual developers are going to drive a power shift towards solo development and away from team-based companies is stupid.
I'm not sure this follows - I find as team size grows, the amount of time spent on synchronization approaches asymptotically to 100%.
If a solopreneur can buy an excavator, the corporate developers will get them too.
Sales and marketing is still 90% of the game. The solopreneur still doesn’t have an easy way to get paying customers. Either you sell SaaS into a network of business contacts, or else you try to play the influencer / reddit / SEO game to get early traction.
Sales teams are alive and well in this area. I’ve been in GTM for nearly my entire career. I have yet to see a company closing 6+ figure deals on a credit card and without a relationship.
There are influencers of all sizes, it can scale accordingly (maybe not equally effective for all sizes for all niches, though).
Like for example this:
> Formfacade is a CRM that competes with HubSpot
It is not a CRM system and it is far from addressing the needs of users of real CRMs. Of course, an early stage startup or a business with less than 1000 customers can handle leads in Google Forms. But that is a lot to handle.
AI does not replace software engineering. It can enhance productivity on certain types of tasks, but AI is doing terrible job on something that mildly deviates from SO answers. It cannot build something like CRM or anything with rich domain.
It is absolutely possible to go solo today, but it’s not because of AI. Tech founder can just write a lot of good code. Business founder won’t get past outsourced no-code solution.
We’re not trying to build every feature of a traditional CRM. We’re focusing on Google Forms as CRM for SMBs because they already use Forms + Sheets to manage leads. Wrote another post explaining how we use it as a CRM - https://manidoraisamy.com/developer-forever/post/can-you-use...
I would argue that at a given size, scale, and growth you would find yourself looping back to the "original pillars".
The example of Neartail[1] competing with Shopify is a prime example of this. Shopify has a large market cap, shareholders demanding profits, a large quantity of paying customers. Neartail has none of these, it may have paying customers and it may have some potential in the future but it is currently all within the sphere of control of a few individuals.
Obviously a lot of what I'm saying is self-inflicted, you don't _have_ to grow endlessly but if you _do_ you need many decision makers and domain knowledge simply starts to reach limits for individuals (even when using AI).
I left my job last year, after over a decade leading design and UX for iOS at Google, to pursue building a bootstrapped solopreneur startup, and the speed at which I've been able to build things out has been wild.
There are entire domains that would have taken weeks or months for me to learn the ins-and-outs of the tech, that Claude has been able to knock out in a matter of minutes. It's like I have two full time junior engineers working with me at all times (with a similar amount of coaching + guidance required), and for $20/month. These are gains of easily 2x-10x productivity and I already consider myself to be fairly productive as a design engineer.
I also started a solopreneur gig building apps.
I have my doubts
I'm not involved in either side of this part of the business. Doesn't this read as "smarter spam"? Does that result in long-term customers?
Perhaps I'm just not aware of just how down-and-dirty the top of the funnel is?
My emotional response is: If you don't value _my_ time (as the customer), why should I consider your product?
Service:
1. pay-by-use
2. subscription
Software:
1. open-source with paid new feature development
2. sales (on app stores)
Physical products:
1: Resell from China in West
2. Develop new from China/anywhere and sell globally. Let big sites like Amazon and Walmart do the marketing and fulfillment.
After 25 years of never once thinking of one, I doubt that's going to change.
It is, except that the result is almost immediate and almost for free.