Ask HN: Where are the AI-driven profits or promotions?

There's plenty of stories like this: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/15/y-combinator-startups-are-fa...

The target for a great startup was 7% growth week-on-week, and now it's 10%. It means back then if you were making $1k/week in Jan 1, 2024, you'd expect to make $33k/week a year later. But thanks to AI, the standard is closer to $142k/week.

Back then, it was normal to raise $75k or so to build a prototype, now you can build a prototype in a couple of weekends. Back then, you would polish your pitch to get VC funding. Now you build, get the customers, then show what the customers are buying and why, and ask for funding to get 1000x the number of customers.

A lot of the risk factors have been removed. Building a legacy app no longer take multiple sync calls and weeks, they can be resolved in hours and maybe one sync call. Yes, I have a story of AI migrating a whole DB table when I asked it to move a button to another page. But it gets the tables right about 7 out of 10 times if you give it the right instructions. I dislike ORMs; they're practically a code smell. And AI works around that layer.

At my work, we've been using AI since its beginnings. The company offers free subscriptions to every person, sw dev, qa, marketing, anyone. I'd say 9/10 people are using and writing code with it.

I've seen no actual improvement in the development speed of our product. Same pace. Same endless discussions. Same meetings. It hasn't changed the pace nor it has lead to an explosion of ideas, implementations or discussions. It did lead to an increase in code and deployed microservices, though, but that is not really a good thing in itself.

It's like making a commitment to eat healthy, diversified food. And, as we did in the '90 in the post-communist country I'm living, we've let the doors wide open for all the food to enter. Junk or otherwise, without, from our part, any knowledge of what is healthy and what not. Tremendous amount of choices, little, close to zero knowledge about what is good and what is not.

We've been building voice AI for 8 years, so I've watched this from both sides - first building AI products, now using AI tools to build faster.

Honestly, the productivity gains feel like a mirage sometimes. Yes, I can prototype features in days instead of weeks now. But getting those prototypes to production quality? Still takes the same amount of time. Real-time voice processing can't have the hallucinations or edge case failures that AI-generated code often has.

The weirdest part is how expectations shifted. When I delivered a feature in 2 weeks before, that was good. Now if I use AI and deliver in 1 week, suddenly 1 week becomes the new baseline for everything. You're not getting ahead - you're just keeping up with inflated expectations.

I've seen the real AI profits go to people who can build complete products solo, not just code faster at their day job. A few engineers I know left big tech to build AI-powered micro-SaaS. They're making $50K/month instead of waiting years for senior staff promotions that might bump them $20K.

But here's the catch - if starting an AI product is 10x easier, so is your competition. We're seeing way more AI startups, but the success rate is about the same. The bottleneck was never "can you build it fast enough" - it was always "do people actually want this."

Business owners make their profits from simply owning their businesses. Workers profit by producing value and getting compensated for a portion of the value they produce - the rest going to business costs and owners. Why would higher worker productivity translate to higher compensation? Owners don’t part from their extra profits unless pressured to do so. Higher productivity does not produce higher wages.

This is the productivity-pay gap, in place since 1980 as real wages have barely budged while productivity has continued to skyrocket, the value from the accruing to a small wealthy minority.

Besides causing social ills such as the concomitant de-democratization of society we are witnessing around us as a direct result of this, the productivity pay gap also undermines the fundamental fallacy of the AI hype crowd - higher productivity doesn’t translate into broader benefits for society, only for the business owning class.

Only external pressure can force business owners to part with gains from rising productivity. With the productivity-pay gap of the last 55 years wealth is so concentrated that the government today is entirely captured by business owners. Billionaires wave their hands and select government officials, unmake the constitution, and form new political parties. Can our government be relied on to pressure business owners into parting with their growing profits and raise wages? Our government has failed to do this for 55 years.

If engineers want higher wages for their increased productivity - which has multiplied since 1980 with little of that going to workers - then we will have to pressure business owners ourselves. The best way of doing that is unionizing.

I’m a software engineer turned business owner. I run a software agency and we’re building client projects at a rate I could never have dreamed about. We’re not sacrificing quality at all. In fact, if anything we’re increasing quality.

All code is reviewed by senior devs. We use Rails so that probably helps get good results.

No promotions here but our clients love the results we’re delivering (they did before AI too).

Not a 10x story but we’re definitely getting a lot more done than we did before and we’re able to maintain a level of quality we just couldn’t before. TDD + AI refactoring leads to unbelievably clean codebases.

"If the productivity gains are so huge, shouldn’t we see those engineers getting promoted super fast or getting rich from building a product extremely fast?"

This is an entirely different question in itself, and isn't really related to AI, but more between productivity and corporations.

Corporations are a pipeline. You have a certain amount of input and a certain amount of output. There is a queue of input stuff. If that queue runs dry, then you have wasted productivity. The pipe manager is being negligent somewhere - either we can cut down on costs by removing the cogs in the machine, or someone further up the pipe isn't producing enough output to satisfy the inputs.

If FE has too much free time, then your options are: 1) pull FE into BE, 2) pull work from BE to FE, 3) get FE to do product stuff like A/B testing or talking to customers, 4) make more FE teams or even have one person in two teams, 5) turn the site into an app or the app into a site, 6) slow them down by making them return to office, 7) fire someone

A Chinese company might have a couple dudes dedicated to answering all questions on APIs and the systems. A Western company will simply not document things or overdocument it to the point that it's too obtuse to read and yet doesn't answer the question. The worst cases I've seen is developing a whole new programming language, which becomes a white elephant maintained by interns.

But the point is, there's mechanisms that kick in and slow down productivity so nobody needs to be laid off. There's also additional mechanisms like engineers being sick of working in 3 teams at once with no documentation, and so they leave.

Where is all this super software rocked launched by AI? Looking at the hype I should be able to easily find something life-changing (for better).

It is all about competition which is, at its root, differentiation. The productivity can lead to increased wages for workers if workers are able to jump jobs because of this stuff. Not sure that it works like that with the AI tools. It could also work if programmers started leaving jobs to do their own thing. Programmers need to get scarce to bump up salaries. As for companies, their profits are also linked to competition. If they have equally good competitors, then extra productivity is likely to lead to lower prices to keep attracting customers. The customers profit. If they are more unique, then the extra productivity can lead to higher profits as they shrink their costs (fewer programmers, earlier deliverables, better customization to what customers want). All of these forces take time to shake out.

The most likely path is to enable a million independent projects to flourish and to find unserved niches that lead to a good, but not exorbitant, income, at least for a time.

Workers never benefit from productivity gains, doesn’t matter what is fueling those gains, AI, factory technology, automobiles instead of horses, etc. Business owners and executives benefit because they are at the top of the hierarchy where the profits are scooped.

Sure there are workers that get bonuses, but your bonus for a worker or lower level manager typically is pre-determined so if you overwork and contribute 50% more productivity enhancing output, you don’t get 50% more in your bonus.

One path could be to build your own thing and become a business owner but that is much more work than just building software.

I find it amusing how everyone commenting in this thread tries to sidestep the question you've asked and how at the time of writing this comment there's not a single direct answer.

Have you seen Microsoft’s stock price gains recently? Engineers do become more valuable in getting more done, but ironically their market rate goes down because you end up with a surplus of engineers.

The boring answer is 99% of promotions and raises are not tied to productivity or impact.

The "10x" programmer in your org is getting a pat on the back and a 2.1% raise instead of the 2% raise everyone else is getting.

The company I work for is improving their software at a much faster rate. We've solved extremely tricky problems plaguing our reliability and usability using AI. The error rates for key systems are approaching 0%.

  > But does anyone have stories of the actual results or impact?

I'll be intentionally vague here, but there are companies which are attempting to identify members whose output is quantifiably improved and retain + compensate them at increased rates.

Will this work at every org? Probably not. Will it work for some? It seems reasonable to me, though we can't plot the long-tail of these sorts of efforts yet, I think.

Most recently, AI helped me salvage and refactor a giant and completely mismanaged outsourced rewrite of a popular niche site.

Without it, the site would suffer a slow and painful death in the SERPs and would lead to about 10MM annual loss for the company.

Starting from scratch with a proper, qualified team was not possible for political reasons.

So, being able to do it as a single person, with heavy AI assistance, is a huge win.

GPT 3.5 was only released in late 2022. It really hasn’t even been a full three years. We’re still discovering what we even want to do with this stuff. Shocking when you say it out loud, it hasn’t even been three years. Let the kid grow up a bit.

Unprecidented profits with the new AI NFT tokens, they have NVIDIA written on them.

I got one anecdote: My freelancing college friend said he started extensively vibe coding worst-quality slop that „just works“, making customers happy with unfixable slop, instead manually writing good or best practice stuff. He said there are many projects where he does not code at all anymore.

I need to get back to him and ask him why he isn‘t making more money than before…

Where are the e-mail-driven profits?

I use ChatGPT every day, to make myself more efficient (I get things done more quickly and with higher quality). Nobody really knows I use it.

If everyone has access to the same AI tools, why would that happen? Everyone would just have their productivity supercharged at the same rate.

At my company I’ve seen 2 types of changes:

1. We’ve got a smart senior dev who’s very excited about AI. His core work hasn’t changed much, but he has generated a lot of AI driven unit tests that mock so much that they’re worse than no unit tests. I approached him about this and he kinda shrugged - said it was good test coverage went up. He’s much more attracted to building new things than making things well, which I think is the source of the issue.

2. We have a low performing dev who has spit out not great code (I think a result of being unable to evaluate what code is good) at a much higher rate. The PR reviews are a massive increase in time wasted.

Both of these devs have personally stated AI has made them much more productive. It’s greatly tempered how I view AI productivity claims I see online.

Personally I use it everyday and am willing to pay for it, but I’ve seen limited uses where it’s 10x (translations, areas I’m a novice).

People have those stories, and there is a search box at the bottom of the page where you can find them.