Just how much human engineering work is AI capable of delivering? Grindr put a number to it.
In a letter to shareholders, Grindr CEO George Arison touted the company’s advances with AI. He gave a “conservative estimate” that engineering output increased by 2.5x between July 2025 and April 2026, with “minimal growth” in its engineering staff.
Arison later said that the actual multiple was 3.5x on Grindr’s second-quarter earnings call. The company changed it to 2.5x because they thought the larger increase sounded “unreasonable,” he said.
“Before GenAI, producing that much technical output would have required roughly 200 additional engineers and approximately $60 million in annual cost,” Arison wrote.
Grindr measured output in the amount of code shipped. That’s a controversial metric; some say it prioritizes quantity over quality.
Marco Argenti, Goldman Sachs’ chief information officer, told Business Insider in May that measuring lines of code was “not really a great way to do it.”
Others attempt to measure productivity by the volume of AI tokens spent, which can lead to tokenmaxxing.
Arison told CNBC on Thursday that the company was on track to spend $6 million on tokens this year. An analyst asked Arison about tokens on the company’s earnings call.
“We are of the view that people should use all the tools that are out there and not really worry about the cost to them as long as the ROI that we want to see is there,” he responded.
Even if Grindr did want to bring on the 200 engineers needed to match that AI productivity jump, the CEO said in his letter that the industry’s constraint has always been a “scarcity of exceptional engineering talent.”
AI allows Grindr to keep its most exceptional engineers focused on the areas where it “most benefits from human creativity and judgment,” he wrote.
Engineers are worried about their jobs. AI code editors are becoming increasingly competent, while layoffs rip through Big Tech. Companies like Block and Atlassian have specifically cited AI in their layoff announcements.
Despite the hubbub, job openings for software engineering roles actually rose this year.
Arison is one of the few CEOs who has put into numbers how many jobs would be needed to achieve a similar output without AI. The Grindr CEO’s remarks were notably not about cutting jobs, but rather not creating new ones. (But engineers could understandably read CEO quotes like this and worry about the possibility that a company could eventually decide to downsize in the name of “do more with less.”)
On the earnings call, Grindr’ CEO shared an anecdote about the changing workforce size.
When he took the Grindr job, Arison said he described his vision to a mentor, noting it would require 250-300 engineers. His mentor said that needing all those engineers was “the old world,” and that AI coding could do much of the work.
“It’s a really incredible outcome for us,” Arison said.
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