Why Does AI Leave Developer Budgets About the Same?
Naveen Rao says the share of developer salary that shifts to coding tools may stay roughly stable, because training people to judge good code is the hard part.
Benioff described spending $300 million of a $6 billion developer salary budget on core code and coding tools, the 5% case. The open question was whether the share stays at 5%, rises to 30% or 50%, or falls to 1%. Code quality matters more than lines of code. Very experienced developers, the 10X developers, build a sense of what looks good and what is aesthetically right, and they can make things work fast. Coders who know what is good verify model output and become more efficient. Pay for humans plus AI does not change drastically. Output does. A company spending $10 million a year to develop software keeps paying $10 million. Ten years ago customers were happy with one-year release cycles. They now want a bug fixed in a week, and later within an hour. Hitting that pace takes AI working with humans. The team does more, not less, and still needs humans who can verify the output and move toward a useful goal, fixing the bug or adding features.
Delivery speeds up because customers demand it. The same task can be done for less with AI plus humans, and the team does far more of the work because demand has increased.
