Today a manager at my work asked all his teams including mine “please write up a report on how many engineers from your teams we could replace with AI”.
Surprisingly, the answer he got was “none, because that’s not how AI works”.
I use various agentic dev tools all day long, mostly with Opus. The tools are very capable now, but when planning mid-complexity features, I find the time estimates hilarious.
Phase 1: 1-2 weeks
Phase 2: 1 week
Phase 3: 2 weeks
8 to 12 hours later, all the work is done and tested.
The funny part to me was that if I had an AI true believer boss, I would report those time estimates directly, and have a lot of time to do other stuff.
Human time estimates are bad, but the ones that AI gives are just absurd. I've seen them used from small things like planning interviews and short presentations, all the way up to large scale projects. In no case do they make any sense to me. But I think people end up trusting them because they look so confident and well planned due to how the AIs break things down.
Surprisingly, the answer he got was “none, because that’s not how AI works”.
Guess we’ll see if that registers…