Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson stated that artificial intelligence (AI) has destroyed the value of using the number of developers as a metric. He made this statement on Sunday during a discussion about the privacy-focused blockchain Midnight, built on Cardano. The project team recently reduced the staff responsible for attracting external developers and focused on what Hoskinson calls "builders."
For a decade, blockchains were evaluated based on the number of engineers writing code for them. This metric made sense because a skilled developer was a scarce resource. However, the emergence of AI code-writing assistants has changed the situation. Now anyone can create working software without technical knowledge, Hoskinson argues. He noted, "You can have people who lack technical knowledge and experience using these tools to appear as developers. Thus, it is no longer a scarce and finite resource." According to him, this creates problems with authorship verification: teams spend time figuring out who actually created the code instead of attracting projects. Hoskinson emphasized that he wants to see initiatives that focus on users and attract external investors rather than getting bogged down in unproductive code verification.
Despite his remarks about counting developers, the Midnight Foundation still organizes competitions with prize funds totaling $26,500, which creates some controversy from Hoskinson's perspective. He acknowledged that he sees the situation differently than the foundation, which is conducting three hackathons, the latest of which opened on September 1. In addition to this, the price of Cardano (ADA) is around $0.21, and since his statement about the strategy change, there have been no significant changes in market reaction. It will be important to determine whether the growth in the number of builders in the project will compensate for the departure of developers, which will become evident over the next two quarters.
Related articles
