It would allow small team to increase their velocity 10-fold. And I can see a glimpse of that here too where so many posts and comments share how much AI transformed one's life.
So my question is, if AI is such a game changing platform, where are the apps? I'm still using the same stuff as I did before, I don't see much disruption in any field. Am I just impatient?
Weird.
Again, you need to question the premise. Perhaps all the sales and hype you heard simply wasn't true?
In reality, many organizations have already implemented the AI-based improvements to their systems that they need. That work is done, people are enjoying it. The AI vendors want to take it farther. Some coders want to take it farther. Some leaders are pushing it due to FOMO. But "the masses" do not want more. Step outside of the tech silos, and you'll find that most people do not want more AI than we already have.
That said there are a few genuine examples
Cursor basically replaced how a lot of developers write code, Eleven Labs made voiceover work that used to cost thousands into a $5 task, and Gamma turned presentations from a half-day job into 10 minutes none of these replaced entire industries overnight but they each quietly made a whole category of work much much cheaper.
I think we're looking at the wrong demographic/professional sector and throwing up our hands. You have to look at people who don't have as much professional experience with it because everyone you didn't write software in the 2010's is writing it now.
- I'm seeing prototypes escape Figma and live as code for a faster/closer demo experience for product managers.
You can't.
I'm not convinced most software developers ever spent the majority of their time coding though... A huge part of the job is taking messy user requirements and converting them into technical requirements, and perhaps you could let AI do that for a while but after some time it will blow up in your face if you don't have any opinion on the technical requirements. Software developers also spend a lot of their time thinking about how to architect solutions, considering different technologies and libraries to use, thinking about how to model data, etc...
If I were to guess before AI I suspect the average software developer spent 50% of their day typing code into an editor, so even if AI made this 10-20x faster, that still wouldn't be a 2x in output unless they're also faster at the other parts of the job too... And maybe they are a bit... So maybe the average developer is 2x, or even 3x more productive today with AI. But 10x is so absurd that unless you were a junior developer building Wordpress themes or something I have no idea how you could be working at anywhere remotely close to 10x velocity you were previously.
I mean spent 4 or my 8 work hours in meetings on a single day last week, that time certainly didn't go 10x faster because of AI... Is my career as a SWE some extreme outlier, or do other people also have meetings and do other things in their day that doesn't involving producing code?
The premise, originally, was that AI would empower workers to do more with less. Granted this is anecdotal, but most of the stuff I use today is much the same as it was 5 years ago. It seems the world is improving at the same rate as it did before, generally speaking.
