a16z General Partner Matt Bornstein reflects on how quickly developer tooling paradigms shifted away from simple inline autocomplete.
Opinion
Bornstein: Only 12 to 24 Silicon Valley Teams Truly Master AI Product Velocity
“I think there's a relatively small set of companies in Silicon Valley right now that Get AI, building AI-native products, and just, like, work their butts off and ship products at high velocity. That's kind of the magic recipe right now, I think, and there's, …”
Prediction Open · timeframe Jul 2030
Bornstein: AI developer tools will increase, not shrink, software engineering headcount
“I think the best way to think about this is simply that we're going to have more developers. I think it's very unlikely that like we're going to shrink development teams because we have amazing new tools. Like that's just kind of not how these markets have wor…”
Opinion
Bornstein: Synthetic data will not produce self-improving AI models
“The question is, like, does this lead to sort of, like, a self-improving utopia of models or not? And I think we have some pretty strong opinions on the not side of that.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bornstein: AI cannot solve legacy code migration due to lost context
“AI may be able to transpile, you know, COBOL to Java, but there's a huge amount of context in what went into creating that COBOL code that's been totally lost, right?”
Opinion
Bornstein: Most current commercial AI agents are just weekend demos
“Most of what we're seeing in the market now is like, is not the decade version of this problem. It's like the weekend demo version of this problem.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bornstein: Enterprise buyers force AI vendors into GPU cost-plus pricing
“In practice, I think most buyers are actually pretty sophisticated about what's going on under the hood. And to your point, they know it's like pretty simple stuff happening. And so what does it cost you to run all these GPUs? And we'll pay you some premium ov…”