7 ms·
Realize it's going to be 10-100x more expensive once you have no way back?
by boesboes 6mo ago
Realize it's going to be 10-100x more expensive once you have no way back?
- theshrike79 6mo agoWhat will close the way back?
- xandrius 6mo agoYou cutoff a generation of juniors from employment and learning , the seniors are gone and it's all harnesses and AI systems. I'm not all gloom and doom but the treatment of junior engineers is something I think we will either regret or rejoice. Either will have a spur of creative people doing their own independent thing or we'll have lost a generation of great engineers.
- orangecoffee 6mo agoThis is not happening at least for 25 years, is what seniors I trust tell me.
- GrinningFool 6mo agoI'd say closer to 10-15 but... I'm not sure the point you're making. Is it okay because it's 25 years in the future?
- lionkor 6mo agoIf we try hard enough, we can destroy the planet before we get there, I guess? 25 years is not a long time.
- est 6mo agoToday junior assembly language programmer are all gone, too.
- MagicMoonlight 6mo agoAnd that’s going to cause serious issues when people like Linus die and nobody knows how to make operating systems anymore. We’ve been coasting along on a single generation who have ruled with iron fists.
- fxtentacle 6mo agoYes and that’s why I can charge premium rates for debugging. Most people cannot read a stack trace anymore.
- ehnto 6mo agoLack of developers, if juniors don't get hired they will move onto other industries. Company brain drain, knowledge leaves with your seniors if you decide to get rid of them, or they just leave due to the conditions AI creates. I don't know if the above comes to fruition, there's a lot of questions that only time will answer. But those are my first thoughts.
- codebje 6mo agoBrain drain. If you fire all your SWEs they won't sit around twiddling their thumbs waiting for an AI collapse, they'll career shift. Maybe to an unemployment line and/or homelessness, maybe to something else productive, but either way they'll lose SWE skills. If you close down all the SWE junior positions you'll strongly discourage young people training in the field. They'll do something else. Then if you want to go back, who will you hire for it?
- nubg 6mo agoI agree with you, but it's a case of the tradegy of the commons. One single company cannot make a meaningful dent even with your insight.
- svantana 6mo agoWhy would anyone want to go back? It seems likely that the automated dev systems will just keep improving and get faster, cheaper, stronger.
- lionkor 6mo ago> automated dev systems They are large language models. Not automated development machines. They hallucinate. The goal post has not shifted since 2023 or so. Make an LLM that doesn't blatantly disregard knowledge it has, instructions it has been giving, over and over, and you win. If trillions of USD of investment can't do it, I'd be curious to see what can.
- svantana 6mo agoThere are definitely automated dev systems, of which an LLM is a part. The remaining part may be called a 'harness' or whatever. The quality of the generated software is another matter. If the AI is not good enough, then don't fire the devs. If/when the devs are no longer needed, I don't see why the need would return later, that was my point.
- HarHarVeryFunny 6mo ago
- amelius 6mo agoTime. In a few years there might be no old-school way to develop anymore. Everything will be built around AI.
- pjc50 6mo agoThe problem of "instant legacy" systems: something that's vibe coded and reached unmaintainable by either the AI or humans, but is also now indispensable because users are relying on it.
- tdeck 6mo agoI'm curious if this will cause a drop in quality that will lead users to generally lose trust in software.
- pjc50 6mo agoSome of that is already there .. but the users generally have nowhere else to go and ineffective pushback. "Enterprise software" has been awful for decades, things like Lotus Notes and SAP. Everyone hates Windows; everyone continues to use Windows.
- eloisius 6mo agoSee Windows 11
- GrinningFool 6mo agoUsers don't currently trust software. Look at what we've done to them - can you blame them? The consumer space is about extracting every ounce of personal data possible. The b2b space is about "maximizing customer value" - that is, not maximizing the value of your product to the customer, but maximizing the value of the customer to your business. Lock them in and lock them down, make your product "sticky" so they can't leave without immense cost.
- HarHarVeryFunny 6mo agoThere will always be competition. For every company negatively impacting customer experience and their own ability to compete, there will be others happy to step in and take advantage of that.
- varjag 6mo agoHey you can just rewrite (or should we say regenerate) it. Second system has never been cheaper!
- FeepingCreature 6mo agoThere is no moat. https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat...
- livinglist 6mo agoThe article is from 2023, I’m wondering if things mentioned still stand true today, can someone pls let me know.
- raincole 6mo agoIt's much truer today. You can say that article is extremely insightful, as it predicted today's open weighted models scenario 2 years earlier.
- energy123 6mo agoIt remains an unproven hypothesis. The revenue of the top 2-3 labs is still growing nearly exponentially, which is the ultimate piece of data that settles the question empirically for now. Benchmark scores aren't really proof. Benchmaxxing is possible, for example. Only revenue numbers (and gross margins) count.
- quikoa 6mo agoThe ultimate piece is not revenue but profit. At some point these enormous investments will have to be earned back. Good luck with that when open weight models are also continuously improving, have cheap providers and for many are already very usable.
- DrScientist 6mo agoThe other point to make is that companies are starting to worry about the risks of externally hosted models. This is at multiple levels if you have a remote API call as a key part of your workflow/software system. 1. Price risk - might be affordable today - but what about tomorrow? 2. Geopolitical risk - your access might be a victim of geopolitics ( seems much more likely that it used to be ). 3. Model stability/change management - you've got something working at the API get's 'upgraded' and your thing no longer works. If you are running on open weight models - you are potentially fully in control - ( even if you pay somebody to host - you'd expected there to be multiple hosting options - with the ultimate fallback of being able to host yourself ).
- user34283 6mo agoHow do you reconcile these ideas with the fact that cheap open weight models are only slightly behind the state of the art? If anything, I would bet that next year you could get today’s flagship performance for significantly cheaper via an open-weights model.
- LurusCode 6mo agoYou can easily develop with models like GLM 5.1 and Kimi k2.6 at a fraction of the cost of GPT 5.5 or Opus 4.7. Requests often cost just a few cents. Open-source models have caught up tremendously recently. Those who can’t or don’t want to invest a lot of money can already develop with Kimi and GLM without any problems. We don’t have to wait another year for that.
- GrinningFool 6mo agoTried deepseek 4 w/ CC yesterday, and was watch my usage eke up by only 0.01 at a time while doing plenty of high-token-count tasks. I understand it's currently at a discount, but even after that expires the same-quality output will be available at a fraction of the cost of the expensive models. From experience, the same level of usage would have left me stranded on my CC 5 hr limit within an hour. There were some difficulties with tool calls, in particular with replacing tab-indented strings - but taking no steps to mitigate that (which meant the model had to figure it out every time I cleared context) only cost relatively few extra tokens -- and it still came in well under 4.6, nevermind 4.7. And of course, I can add instructions to prevent churning on those issues. I have no reason to go back to anthropic models with these results. "No moat" indeed.
- wartywhoa23 6mo agoSure, but there will always be some monstrosities like Mythos that'll pwn all software written by local models in 0.01 seconds, thus forcing people/companies to use the most advanced paid models to keep up and stay unpwned for 1 second longer. (Timeframes are hyperbolical).
- duskdozer 6mo agoBy that time, the hypebeasts will be explaining how worthless the models of today always were.