It’s 10 devs with a small ai budget each vs 1 ex-dev now PM with a large ai budget - the choice is quite obvious for any decision maker who counts time and money

But assuming that one ex-dev with a large AI budget is highly profitable, why wouldn’t you convert the other 9 and give large ai budgets as well?

I guess if the company has no opportunities for growth so they only need exactly as much output as one team? But that sounds like a company that’s doomed anyway, regardless of ai.

You need to grow customers or contracts by 10x to fill the new pipeline and that's an impedance mismatch. Easier to let 9 go and hire later, especially since everyone else will be doing the same thing and there'll be a rather large pool of talent.

How you identify talent in this new world is a different kind of a problem which I don't think people figured out still and won't for quite a while.

If an org suddenly has 10x the production capacity for the same price and can’t figure out how to sell it profitably, it is mismanaged and will die. That’s very much the case for a lot of businesses for sure, but there have been filters before (the internet, for instance) and we survived.