A blog post published by a company that's built their business on AI (Final Round AI), extrapolating from a comment by a CEO who's also in the business of AI (GitHub) and actively wants to sell you more expensive AI options, tells me I must use AI. It's hard to get more biased if you tried.
I see a worrying trend of CEOs using openly hostile language towards employees, even in those companies who should be a bit better. I wonder if they have an endgame and what it is. Voluntary resignation?
I just spent 25 minutes trying to install a command-line tool called citus_dump that Cursor told me could help port data between Postgres citus clusters only to find out that the tool doesn't exist and that the language model just made it up. AI-assisted coding is definitely enticing, but we have so long to go until you can trust AI-generated code in production environments.
I really don't understand why CEOs like this who are AI boosters try to justify the idea that this will create more developers, when that seems exceedingly unlikely, even if they are correct in their predictions of productivity increases.
The quote from the article "if you 10x a single developer, then 10 developers can do 100x." implies that companies have 100x the things to be developed productively, what if that isn't the case?
What if companies actually have about as many systems as they need, if you really can 10x your existing developers, then that would predicate a cut not an increase.
Of course the follow on from that, for suppliers who have per-seat licensing is that they'll need to find some other way to monetize if there are fewer seats to be sold, I guess they could start charging AI Agents as "developer seats"....
> implies that companies have 100x the things to be developed productively, what if that isn't the case?
Good point. I think that's demonstrably already a problem. Software products are notoriously prone to enshittification in part because successful companies build up vast development teams that have to somehow justify their existence with continuous feature churn.
So who should I believe? A guy who I've never heard the name of (apparently the Github CEO's name is Thomas Dohmke, I just learned), or a bunch of legends whose tools I have been using since a child?
Well, in terms of it being a career that seems obviously true (idk about the timeline).
The developers resisting AI have a hard time understanding that "artisanal" is not real label for software developers. We are not glas blowers. We are not artists. We solve problems and there are infinitely many sufficiently good ways to solve a problem. Having opinions about how is only helpful in so far it helps solves the problem. It has no other purpose to the people paying for the product. If your opinion makes the good enough product more expensive then you make your work less desirable.
As long as people are competing in the labor marketplace, that is just not a winning tactic.
I know some operations that have not even embraced source control yet and are still running, so I'm skeptical about being a laggard being so devastating.
> You know what else we noticed in the interviews? Developers rarely mentioned “time saved” as the core benefit of working in this new way with agents.
> They were all about increasing ambition. We believe that means that we should update how we talk about (and measure) success when using these tools
no, you don't have to "get out of this career", but it's probably prudent to get out of these "ai-first" companies before the company (or at least department) implodes and you don't have a job anyway
I wish his own developers would take him up on the advice, but the market out there is tough and jobs where CEOs'/CTOs' eyes aren't rolling into the back of their head from AI hype are rare.
I already got out of the tech career. But not because I didn't embrace AI – even though I never will. It's exactly because of people like Thomas Dohmke. What an irritating and contemptible individual.
I have advice for this CEO too, but I like not being flagged :)
Thanks to what Microsoft did to Github, I moved to Gitlab. So I doubt I will ever take advice from a CEO, never mind this person. FWIW, most CEOs come out of marketing, so that alone tells you how much he really knows about development.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 56.3 ms ] threadThis is the person they have running GitHub?
(Yes, Ad Hominem)
I think he might be drunk
The quote from the article "if you 10x a single developer, then 10 developers can do 100x." implies that companies have 100x the things to be developed productively, what if that isn't the case?
What if companies actually have about as many systems as they need, if you really can 10x your existing developers, then that would predicate a cut not an increase.
Of course the follow on from that, for suppliers who have per-seat licensing is that they'll need to find some other way to monetize if there are fewer seats to be sold, I guess they could start charging AI Agents as "developer seats"....
Good point. I think that's demonstrably already a problem. Software products are notoriously prone to enshittification in part because successful companies build up vast development teams that have to somehow justify their existence with continuous feature churn.
I think it's reasonable to be sceptic towards a guy who:
- sells you a product (Copilot) that depends on him selling you the story that LLMs are the future
- has a lot of vested interest in Microsoft's bet on LLMs to succeed
On his own platform developers that I much more look up to have gone the other direction and have disabled AI PRs and/or bug bounties on their repos:
- Daniel Stenberg (curl) https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/15/curl_creator_mulls_ni...
- Linus (linux) https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/29/linus_torvalds_ai_hyp...
- or socket.dev's quest to prevent copilot generated PRs (https://socket.dev/blog/oss-maintainers-demand-ability-to-bl...) this might have struck a nerve
So who should I believe? A guy who I've never heard the name of (apparently the Github CEO's name is Thomas Dohmke, I just learned), or a bunch of legends whose tools I have been using since a child?
No to slop! Down with slop.
The developers resisting AI have a hard time understanding that "artisanal" is not real label for software developers. We are not glas blowers. We are not artists. We solve problems and there are infinitely many sufficiently good ways to solve a problem. Having opinions about how is only helpful in so far it helps solves the problem. It has no other purpose to the people paying for the product. If your opinion makes the good enough product more expensive then you make your work less desirable.
As long as people are competing in the labor marketplace, that is just not a winning tactic.
> They were all about increasing ambition. We believe that means that we should update how we talk about (and measure) success when using these tools
I’m struggling to understand what this means.
no, you don't have to "get out of this career", but it's probably prudent to get out of these "ai-first" companies before the company (or at least department) implodes and you don't have a job anyway
Thanks to what Microsoft did to Github, I moved to Gitlab. So I doubt I will ever take advice from a CEO, never mind this person. FWIW, most CEOs come out of marketing, so that alone tells you how much he really knows about development.