> Are you saying devs aren't part of the workers being laid off?
No, they are saying that the reason for the layoffs is not AI, it is financial changes making devs too expensive.
> If that is true then you need way less devs.
This does not follow. First of all, companies take a long time to measure dev output, it's not like you can look at a burn down chart over two sprints and decide to fire half the team because it seems they're working twice as fast. So any productivity gains will show up as layoffs only after a long time.
Secondly, dev productivity is very rarely significantly bounded by how long boilerplate takes to write. Having a more efficient way to write boilerplate, even massively more efficient, say 8h down to 1h, will only marginally improve your overall throughput, at least at the senior level: all that does is free you to think more about the complex issues you needed to solve. So if the task would have previously taken you 10 days, of which one day was spent on boilerplate, it may now take you, say, 8-9 days, because you've saved one day on boilerplate, plus some more minor gains here and there. So far from firing 7 out of every 8 devs, the 8h-to-1h boilerplate solution might allow you to fire 1 dev in a team of 10.
No, they are saying that the reason for the layoffs is not AI, it is financial changes making devs too expensive.
> If that is true then you need way less devs.
This does not follow. First of all, companies take a long time to measure dev output, it's not like you can look at a burn down chart over two sprints and decide to fire half the team because it seems they're working twice as fast. So any productivity gains will show up as layoffs only after a long time.
Secondly, dev productivity is very rarely significantly bounded by how long boilerplate takes to write. Having a more efficient way to write boilerplate, even massively more efficient, say 8h down to 1h, will only marginally improve your overall throughput, at least at the senior level: all that does is free you to think more about the complex issues you needed to solve. So if the task would have previously taken you 10 days, of which one day was spent on boilerplate, it may now take you, say, 8-9 days, because you've saved one day on boilerplate, plus some more minor gains here and there. So far from firing 7 out of every 8 devs, the 8h-to-1h boilerplate solution might allow you to fire 1 dev in a team of 10.