It's not really about optimism or pessimism, it's effect vs no effect. Self reported anecdotes like yours abound, but as far as I'm aware the effect isn't real. That is, it's not in fact true that if a business buys AI tools for its developers their output will increase in some way that impacts the business meaningfully. So while you may feel more productive using AI tooling, in fact you probably aren't, actually.

No. If you're trying to make a causal link between some layoffs and AI tooling you need to bring the receipts. Show that the layoffs were caused by AI tooling, don't just assume it. I don't think you can, or that anyone has.

Most public companies aren't attributing it to AI yet due to fear of backlash, but it's obvious to most of us.

And Startups and SMB's are more open to attributing it to efficiency gains due to AI.

If you aren't seeing it then probably it's because you are in a niche vertical. Which is great for you, but not representative on the whole.

I am very much not an AI skeptic, I use AI every day for work, and it's quite clear to me that most of the layoffs of the past few years are correcting for the absurd over hiring from the Covid era. Every software company really convinced themselves that they needed like 2-3x the workforce they actually did because "the world changed". Then it became clear that the world in fact did not fundamentally change in the ways they thought.

Chat GPT just happened to come out around the same time so we get all this misattribution

I agree, the first thing I asked copilot to write me was a feature estimator:

def mult2(points): return 2xpoints

Its going to be really interesting what happens to this labor pool once you've finally sunk all the ships youre let aboard.

> Feature velocity has increase manifold.

And yet, every time somebody not paid by the AI companies tries to measure it, they don't find it.