Are people actually getting financially rewarded
for doing more high-end code and less donkey work, do you know? Or are they just expected to do more burn-out work for the same money?
Are clients charged the same, or have you now got to get more work in to make the same?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfionMmCGoU
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monkeon schmonkeon, Tue 12 May 2026, 14:59,
Reply)
Maybe @Fadgebadger can reply in more informed ways than I can, but this probably depends on what sort of contract you have.
In corporates, "how much" you work is fixed*. If you're a freelancer, there's obviously two ways this can go (are you paid by project vs by the hour/day etc).
(*) obviously there's that philosophical question about "should we all work less thanks to automation", but that's beyond this discussion
(, Wed 13 May 2026, 8:52, Reply)
But is there any evidence
that a dev's pay has actually increased since LLMs arrived and their "productivity improved". No one positive about AI ever seems to talk the economics.
My assumption is that either clients benefit at the cost of the business, as they are told by boosters that coding is now a piece of piss and don't understand that something they can generate which looks 70% there is very different to being 70% there, and so they believe the robot will do most of the work (then it becomes a race to the bottom as code is expected to be cheap and devs/sales teams burn out as they now have a far harder job to do), or the company benefits and keeps their prices the same (at the risk of cheaper rivals undercutting them).
High-end dev work *should* be paid more, as that's harder and burns you out faster (arguably a lot of the work AI is doing is the work you can still do when your brain is done for the day). If people are doing more of the hard stuff but aren't paid more-per-hour then they're being screwed over.
Freelancers have to do both sales and dev work, so doubly exhausting.
I don't see how AI can possibly do anything but destroy what was a good ecosystem. We used to share knowledge with each other, now just give it to the billionaire-owned robots which destroyed those communities by stealing from them.
People who think they won't be replaced if it eventually does what the AI companies promise aren't considering why their bosses are so keen on them documenting all their thought processes in little .md documents, which the company own.
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monkeon schmonkeon, Wed 13 May 2026, 10:35,
Reply)
I can speak for my company, but that is obviously not every one
We're a smallish dev house, we're big on wellbeing. I give my devs an amount of work in a sprint, if it's done, it's done it doesn't matter what it took to get to that point. If we use a tool to make us more productive then my two cents is that improvement is given back to the team in lower project pressure and better work-life balance. Our projects are generally costed based on complexity and skill, not necessarily timescales (though they are a factor, albeit a smaller one). We've also increased pay again this year for our devs. AI dev has a cost in itself of course, but the ROI is good enough to keep it around. We've not changed our general project costs we charge to clients, but we've mostly kept them as low as possible for years now. I have no inclination to replace my good developers with AI, but I'm certainly not going to pass up a tool that makes them happier and more productive.
Edit: probably noting that I totally see your (and most others) point about AI, and just because I see it this way, doesn't mean your points are not valid or true.
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Fadgebadger Sweaty sumo wanks for everyone!, Wed 13 May 2026, 11:50,
Reply)
Thanks.
To be honest, I don't think my use is that different to yours at the moment. I'm just probably more focussed on the negatives, and can't see any positive way it could play out long-term for the majority of developers unless things freeze at this point or go tits up for the AI companies (which isn't an impossibility).
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monkeon schmonkeon, Wed 13 May 2026, 12:18,
Reply)