Grindr CEO: AI Did the Work of 200 Engineers
Grindr CEO Says AI Is Doing the Work of 200 Engineers
Grindr's CEO, George Arison, claims that generative AI boosted the company's engineering output by 2.5 to 3.5 times between July 2025 and April 2026, potentially avoiding the need to hire 200 additional engineers and $60 million in annual costs. The company has integrated AI tools like Claude Code and Cursor, with 92% of surveyed engineers reporting at least 1.5x productivity gains. This raises questions about future tech employment, as AI may eliminate the need to create new jobs rather than replace existing ones.
For software developers, the biggest threat from AI may not be waking up one morning to discover that an algorithm has taken their existing job. It may be discovering that the next 200 engineering jobs were never posted in the first place.
- onion2k
He may well be right, but 'more work' is rarely the answer. The key is doing 'the right work'.
In my experience of AI so far, it's really easy to just 'do more', but there's also very little value in the things people are doing. They don't make you more revenue or improve the product in a meaningful way, or even make the product better to work on. Price's Law[1] or the Pareto Principle[2], or whatever similar axiom you like, suggest that most people aren't actually contributing all that much.
If you apply AI to 'more work' you just end up with the same distribution of good to bad things - and it's highly likely that will lead to more outages, maintenance, and people burning out from the downsides. You have to make sure that the work is actually useful. That's hard, and something AI is terrible at.
- baloki
> The company has used the amount of code shipped as a major indicator of engineering output.
> That metric is controversial.
An important point that’s buried quite a bit down the article. Grindr seems to be measuring AI success not on features shipped or business value created, but on number of lines of code generated which seems a fairly flaky justification for such a large AI spend personally.
- mw888
Software developers are famous for lamenting the high time preferences of business forcing them to make poor engineering decisions. The dynamic is common.
Therefore one should not expect higher quality out of many businesses using AI, but you should certainly expect such businesses to highly value AI. The arguments in favor of quality didn't seem to work before, I don't think they will now.