ha ha, this is the response from Microsoft Copolit when I asked:
If 5 or 6 software developers can do the work of 10, do companies choose to build 10% more stuff? Do they make their existing stuff 10% better? Or are they content to continue building the same amount with 10% fewer people?
1. The default outcome: fewer people, same output (at first)
When productivity jumps (e.g., 5–6 devs can now do what 10 used to), most companies do not immediately ship 10% more or make things 10% better.
Instead, they usually:
Freeze or slow hiring
Backfill less when people leave
Quietly reduce team size over time
This happens because:
Output targets were already “good enough”
Budgets are set annually, not dynamically
Management rewards predictability more than ambition
So the first-order effect is cost savings, not reinvestment.
Productivity gains are initially absorbed as efficiency, not expansion.
2. The second-order effect: same headcount, more scope (but hidden)
In teams that don’t shrink, the extra capacity usually goes into things that were previously underfunded:
So yes, the product often becomes “better,” but in invisible ways.
3. Rare but real: more stuff, faster iteration
Some companies do choose to build more—but only when growth pressure is high.
This is common when:
The company is early-stage or mid-scale
Market share matters more than margin
Leadership is product- or founder-led
There’s a clear backlog of revenue-linked features
In these cases, productivity gains translate into:
Faster shipping cadence
More experiments
Shorter time-to-market
But this requires strong alignment. Without it, extra capacity just diffuses.
4. Why “10% more” almost never happens cleanly
The premise sounds linear, but software work isn’t.
Reasons:
Coordination, reviews, and decision-making still bottleneck
Roadmaps are constrained by product strategy, not dev hours
Sales, design, legal, and operations don’t scale at the same rate
So instead of:
“We build 10% more”
You get:
“We missed fewer deadlines”
“That migration finally happened”
“The system breaks less often”
These matter—but they’re not headline-grabbing.
5. The long-run macro pattern
Over time, across the industry:
Individual teams → shrink or hold steady
Companies → maintain output with fewer engineers
Industry as a whole → builds far more software than before
This is the classic productivity paradox:
Local gains → cost control
Global gains → explosion of software everywhere
Think:
More apps, not bigger teams
More features, not more people
More companies, not fatter ones
6. The uncomfortable truth
If productivity improves and:
Demand is flat
Competition isn’t forcing differentiation
Leadership incentives favor cost control
Then yes—companies are content to build the same amount with fewer people.
Not because they’re lazy, but because:
Efficiency is easier to measure than ambition
Savings are safer than bets
Headcount reductions show up cleanly on financials
I don't think there is any different brain chemistry at work. It is just human nature to want to do something with their wealth, for good or ill or whatever.
It is more likely that the people are naturally acquisitive and the ones that succeed then feel the need to continue to do things when the best thing for them and us is for them to stop and just enjoy their wealth.
There’s a stereotype that to be a millionaire in China, you have to write computer code. But that’s not true. The vast majority of rich Chinese are rich because they were in the property sector or in the construction sector or in other basic parts of the economy that receive lots of government spending. So adjustment requires a major transformation in all of the business, political, and financial institutions that have developed over the last 30 years.
A successful growth model will disproportionately benefit certain constituencies. And it will also make those constituencies disproportionately powerful. Which makes it politically difficult to shift away from the model after it’s become obsolete. So you end up following an outdated economic strategy.
China’s growth model has two parts. First, through a variety of policies, you increase the share of national income that goes into savings and reduce the share that goes into consumption. In practice, this means restricting the amount of GDP that goes to households and increasing the amount that goes to businesses. Second, you channel those savings through the banking system into investment.
This model is not unique to China. Quite a number of countries have followed it. China has just followed it to a greater extent than any country in history.
There are so many old American made axes for people who are interested that there is really no need to go low tech. You can pick up axes or axe head for cheap at yard sales or estate sales, follow the instruction in the article to make an axe that rivals what you can get on Amazon.