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Why there are so many people that still believe that AI coding is a fad? It's something that started less than two years ago and companies are already paying th

Why there are so many people that still believe that AI coding is a fad? It's something that started less than two years ago and companies are already paying thousands per seat. I know one that gives you 5k per month. Which other tool went from nothing to this level of acceptance so quickly?

anthonypasq 5mo ago
perhaps the personal computer? Companies were spending 3-5k (10-15k inflation adjusted) on every employee for just hardware. everyone making comparisons to the dotcom bubble seems misguided. this is clearly computing 2.0 imo
- thewebguyd 5mo ago
  No disagreement on computing 2.0, but companies spending 3-5k per employee for hardware isn't generally a monthly cost. It's a at the time of hire, and then once every 3 to 5 years after that, for a monthly amortized cost of about $50/employee. I have my concerns with current inference pricing in that there's a non-zero possibility for a rug pull in the future for the subscription plans for organizations and individuals that can still use them. For now, its only companies larger than ~150 users that need to pay per token, but what if that wasn't the case? Not every company can afford over $1k/month/employee to give them access to AI tooling, further making it harder to compete against the behemoths. If we get to a point where an individual can no longer pay $100/month for nearly unlimited usage and instead must pay per token, that's going to be a problem. Personal computing eventually became an equalizer (until we started centralizing on mainframes again, aka the cloud) because it got cheap. My hope is that inference also gets just as, if not cheaper. I have high hopes for local AI and open weight models and we will continue the ethos of local, personal computing and not needing to offload everything to OpenAI/Anthropic/Google, etc. to get work done once the hardware and hardware availability catch up.
  - dghlsakjg 5mo ago
    Every employee doesn't need $1k in token spend per month, either. That kind of spend makes sense for technical workers in r+d. Most other workers are served fine by $20-30 worth of tokens on a budget model. You don't need Opus to help support write emails.
    - tmp10423288442 5mo ago
      No, but you do want Opus-tier models to do desktop and office software automation (think about people who intensely use Excel and the like). Actually those might take even more tokens that coding in a lot of cases. Why do you think Claude Cowork is successful, and why do you think Codex is leaning so hard into Computer use?
      - dghlsakjg 5mo ago
        I wonder if you will see app makers begin to open APIs (MCPs) up in ways that replace computer use. Computer use via human interfaces is pretty hacky IME, and if you can use an app that exposes spreadsheets in a way that reduces token costs by 90%. I'm optimistic that the demand for AI accessibility will drive programmatic interfaces in places where companies were previously reluctant to.
  - GrinningFool 5mo ago
    Any kind of rug-pull is a serious concern. Companies are re-orienting their entire development processes around these tools. Sure they can go back, but it will require a much larger and more expensive effort than to transition in the first place. All companies who make this transition will be more or less at the mercy of model providers.
- jghn 5mo ago
  Two things can be true at the same time. It can be true that this is here to stay. It can also be true that companies are grossly overvalued right now and that the market is irrationally exuberant. This would mean we could both have a crash and also see AI coding be the new future.
- pixelesque 5mo ago
  Hardware's not generally a subscription, monthly cost though. You update it for them every 3/4 years (if they're lucky). It probably makes a bit more sense to compare it to existing software subscriptions like Office, or the old-school 'per-seat' licenses per user for software.
  - thewebguyd 5mo ago
    There's some software that can cost $1k or more per seat/month, but it's pretty rare. Big tier ERPs usually fall in the ~$600/seat/moth range, specialty engineering stuff can hit over $1k, Bloomberg terminal, etc. I wonder if what Uber's building with that $1.5k/month/employee is actually delivering the same value that something like an ERP would to the entire org...
- pmg101 5mo ago
  I think the right comparison is the invention of the microprocessor. At that time people were grappling with a lot of the same things we are today - would it automate jobs away, would it transform education and the work place, etc.
- dghlsakjg 5mo ago
  The Dotcom bubble is an interesting comparison. The general thrust that everything would be online was correct, it was just that the market mistimed and misallocated of capital by a decade or more. There was massive spending on infrastructure capacity that we wouldn't end up needing until the 2010s. There were hype driven valuations completely disconnected from business fundamentals just because a company was an 'internet' company. Things were going from cutting edge to obsolete in less than a year. There were breathless promises that this was business 2.0! Of course, none of that sounds remotely like what is going on today... I'm optimistic about AI, but I also don't think that it is going to change everything as fast as promised.
  - threetonesun 5mo ago
    The question you always have to ask is what problems does it directly solve. I personally think most of the current problems in software development and really the world at large are not time-bound problems but alignment issues, and all an LLM can really do there is be some 3rd party oracle that gives you an answer without needing other humans to agree with you.
    - rafterydj 5mo ago
      I agree with you. I think that if we're talking about actual reliable problem solving, we have to be discussing robotic / drone systems. Software is as complex as you want to make it, and always has been.
    - squidbeak 5mo ago
      > The question you always have to ask is what problems does it directly solve Most directly, human labour. Labour is always a problem for capital. At a certain level of AI competence, businesses don't need to pay humans to complete the work they need doing in order to operate. I don't think anyone would dispute AI competence isn't growing steadily.
agumonkey 5mo ago
I would use these exact facts as a sign that it's maybe not what it seems. It's much too big and too fast to feel stable. It might keep at that level, increase even more, or drop down to a saner level of use / allocation.
- johnfn 5mo ago
  So it might either go up, stay the same, or go down? :)
  - agumonkey 5mo ago
    heh yeah, i'm also selling trading advice :p
- teeray 5mo ago
  I can see a corporate future where tokens are haggled over in department budgets just like any other line item. Some projects will get more of them, other projects will get less of them. "Use AI for everything" will become "use AI economically and build things that outlast our budget for it."
  - mekael 5mo ago
    Neat fact, those kind of conversations are already happening at ${DAY_JOB}.
- Aurornis 5mo ago
  > It might keep at that level, increase even more, or drop down Bold prediction. :) I think anyone predicting a drop or near-term flattening is not thinking beyond the online bubbles where these tools are discussed. In a local tech meetup a lot of the normal companies are barely coming online with AI tools at their company, and even then with very low limits.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
tokioyoyo 5mo ago
“AI coding is a fad” is not just one big camp of similar-minded people. Different groups have to give up on their pre-existing beliefs in order to be ok with AI coding. Think of people who were very strict with variable names. People who pushed for multiple-levels deep of abstractions for a single API logic that’s not going to be reused. People who believed that coding is craft, rather than just a process to get to the end during work hours. This makes most of these people’s points more-or-less moot. I was in some of those camps, but I’ve seen coding evolve in the last 15 years. So I understand that these priors need to be updated, as most arguments don’t apply to today’s world.
- fragmede 5mo ago
  What's an int vs a float vs a boolean? What's a function? What's a class? What's a variable? You don't actually need to know the answer to those questions in order to vibe code. That's a lot of priors to update!
  - tokioyoyo 5mo ago
    Just to go on record, as of today, I’m a big believer that a person that knows all that stuff is much more productive with AI-coding than a person who doesn’t. I have no idea how we can get people motivated to learn these through trial-and-error when AI coding exists though. I remember the days of spending hours on stupid bugs that AI can resolve within a minute. But I recall learning heavily from those experiences. Oh well…
    - mewpmewp2 5mo ago
      I honestly feel like my own learning has accelerated after using AI. Simply because now it's so easy to write the same thing in so many different languages, I can e.g. learn pros and cons of each language, which otherwise would have been I think unfathomable to me. I have now created so much stuff I wouldn't have had time to create. I setup k3s, and tons of what would be otherwise unnecessarily complicated stuff on my laptop for my side projects with additional home servers, smart house stuff. Otherwise k8s and things like that would have been daunting to learn and in theory and without constant professional exposure, etc... Microservices in Go, Rust, which I didn't have any previous experience with, games in C and other languages. Didn't know anything about low level memory management before. Was just mainly TypeScript person. Just constantly building random fun stuff.
OptionOfT 5mo ago
Because companies are betting that this spending will allow them to reduce cost by firing people. Right now the AI LLM PRs we're seeing are just introducing more work for other people, while these so-called builders are looking good with their new dashboards and functionality they're demoing. But you can't talk to them about the flow of the code. You can't ask them for their thinking as to why certain things are. It's not built up from the ground with experience from x people taken into account. It's materialized from nothing, with no foundational separation, and barely any abstractions. No one wants to touch it. The PRs are too large, and the 'authors' of the PRs aren't on call with us. They get all the glory, but do none of the work. It's kinda like designing a house and then sending it to an architect and engineer saying: make this work.
- saulpw 5mo ago
  > But you can't talk to them about the flow of the code. You can't ask them for their thinking as to why certain things are. You can absolutely do this. It's even right most of the time.
  - datsci_est_2015 5mo ago
    I believe the “them” the OP was talking about was referring to the people opening the PRs, not the LLMs.
    - saulpw 5mo ago
      My mistake, that is definitely a different scene.
  - chmod775 5mo ago
    Let's be real. Most of the time you ask an LLM "Why did you do it like this?", it responds with something along the lines of "Oops. My bad. You're right to point this out." You even have a fair chance of getting a response like that when there isn't anything wrong and the question wasn't rhetorical - which perfectly illustrates the level of the genuine understanding LLMs operate at.
Barrin92 5mo ago
>Why there are so many people that still believe that AI coding is a fad? Because there's not a single piece of evidence that this has improved the quality of the delivered software, or for that matter even the speed of features any of these companies produce, in fact if anything the opposite. The point of software development, the hint is in the name, is to develop software, not consume tokens. If Uber was now full of 10x engineers the stock price of Uber would be up, not down on a yearly basis. Hilariously enough the only company whose stock price is up appears to be Antrophic
- sirsinsalot 5mo ago
  How dare you mention evidence! This isn't engineering you know!
- tuesdaynight 5mo ago
  I don't believe that the quality is the best metric for these companies. I doubt that Google has top-notch code quality in every product they developed, but it does not matter if they are making billions per month. Furthermore, I honestly believe that the quality stayed the same, at least.
lbrito 5mo ago
That's just a non sequitur. "companies are already paying thousands per seat" has zero correlation with something being a fad or not. There are much more reasonable rationales explaining why companies are acting the way they are than "because AI coding is not a fad"
- tmp10423288442 5mo ago
  Can you name a service that charged companies thousands/seat/month that turned out to be almost or completely useless? There's lots of random services sold to corporates that are not very useful (all the random benefits besides health care, life insurance, and other big-ticket items), but the per-seat charge of those is much smaller.
  - edent 5mo ago
    Google Jam Board (and other digital whiteboards) had high upfront capex and lowish opex. Probably close to the price for how often they were used before being killed off. Same with the MS surface(?) tables (not tablets). I saw load of companies buy into the hype and then discard.
  - mike_hock 5mo ago
    Every consultant ever, but to be fair that's not per seat.
    - LtWorf 5mo ago
      Hey I'm a consultant. They pay me to be a regular developer but they cannot hire since they just fired thousands of people which they apparently did need, turns out.
  - marcosdumay 5mo ago
    There are so many. Can I start with Oracle databases?
    - therealdrag0 5mo ago
toasty228 5mo ago
There is a whole spectrum between "ai coding is a fad" and "unlimited tokens for every employees we don't even care if it actually ends up being a net positive financially"
- tmp10423288442 5mo ago
  > "unlimited tokens for every employees we don't even care if it actually ends up being a net positive financially" That was clearly a short-term trend that would obviously get fixed. Doesn't say much about AI coding as a business model.
jbvlkt 5mo ago
Because writing huge amounts of code is easy for humans too. Agents already proved that they can do it. But are agents able to maintain it? I do not know and unless I know for sure, I am not fully committing to AI generated code. i.e. I am able to write about 1k lines of code of "acceptable" quality per week. Which means in 1 year, there will be about 5Ok LoC. I am pretty sure, that I would have to spent like 60-80% of time to maintain 1st year code and the rest to make new features in the second year so I would have to hire more people and spent time to onboard them to maintain velocity. All of that are rough estimates, probably overoptimistic and way worse in 3rd year. Good luck doing such estimates with code agents. Even worse if you already have huge amounts of legacy code.
jujube3 5mo ago
It's cope. People desperately want to believe that AI coding is going away so that they can go back to partying like it's 2020. So there's a huge number of HN posters claiming that the price of tokens will go UP over time rather than down (that's how Moore's Law works, right???) or that code bases that AI contributes to will spontaneously combust, or something.
- dofm 5mo ago
  I don't think it is unreasonable to say both will happen, is it? In the long term, tokens will fall in price. Obviously. (If "tokens" continues to be the unit) In the short to medium term, for the IPOs to succeed, people have to start actually paying for what they are using, so the price will go up, and is going up, quite a lot. Once their value is set they will slowly fall from that point (or some point maybe halfway, depending on how much the market is willing to continue to subsidise). I am an AI cynic, but I am now an informed cynic; I am learning agentic tools so I know where they are useful and I know my enemy. I think the "fad" here is cloud-based, metered AI being a dominant work mode. Nothing, so far, has suggested to me that any other outcome is likely than edge- to local-scale, on-device, on-laptop, on-prem models getting good enough to the point where people use them by default and use the cloud models only when they need the extra oomph. I cannot believe that there is anything other than an enormous incentive for companies like Uber to find local, small model and on-premises solutions to their problems, not least while pricing is so changeable and people are getting nasty surprises. Betting on OpenAI and Anthropic being around over the long term in the form that they are now, that feels like valley hopium. Utility monopolies essentially always derive from physical/geograpical limitations, don't they?
  - jujube3 5mo ago
    I mean, there's an "enormous incentive" for people to run their own data centers rather than using AWS. And yet, cloud is growing and on-premise is shrinking. While I hope local AI continues to exist, I'm skeptical that it will take over, for the same reason running your own servers hasn't taken over. It's just hard, and involves spending huge sums of money up front. It's also not really clear how much tokens are being subsidized. The discussion reminds me of Uber. For years people on HN claimed that Uber was going to collapse once they ran out of VC money. Then... that never happened, and everyone just moved on to discussing other things.
themafia 5mo ago
Why are there so many people who mistake simple anecdotes for actionable data? Why do the majority of businesses fail rather than succeed?
LAC-Tech 5mo ago
Because we have spent a lot of time and money using AI to generate code and have been unimpressed with the results. As for why they got accepted so quickly 1) the industry's long running desperation to deskill computer programming 2) the addictive psychology baked into LLMs "That's an elegant solution! Shall I ... ?"
- asadotzler 5mo ago
  Also, a bucket for VC to put all that NFT, IoT, blockchain, VR investment into. VCs gonna VC and the last 15 years of bets failed so the last few years have been a transition away from those toward "the next thing".
javier2 5mo ago
Because the vibe coded stuff is sometimes great, sometimes it breaks stuff, sometimes it breaks things that we fixed multiple times earlier. The PRs are too large, nobody can review that mess and you better be on call for your deployment. Maybe it will get better, maybe not. I dont know yet.
- therealdrag0 5mo ago
  What about that means AI coding is a fad?
- marcosdumay 5mo ago
  Oh, it won't get any better. LLMs already trained on every bit of code ever published, they won't get any more material.
  - throwatdem12311 5mo ago
    If anything the snake is eating it’s own tail because now it’s training on vast amounts of its new slop…dragging down the average bar of quality.
  - therealdrag0 5mo ago
    They can be reinforced with best practices and context windows etc will increase.
- Gigachad 5mo ago
  The massive PRs is something that probably has to end. You can ai generate smaller changes in reviewable PR sizes. It probably even helps the AI code review tools to break the work in to smaller logical chunks too.
  - javier2 5mo ago
    Yes you can, and this is still the most realistic use of AI llms, but this is a 2x multiplier, not 10x or 20x
sirsinsalot 5mo ago
Fear of loss to competitors embracing a technology creates a fear driven adoption. Let me ask you this: is any technology worth so much break-neck adoption without first seeing clear evidence of ROI? No. The adoption is irrational.
- anamexis 5mo ago
  What makes you think there is no clear evidence of ROI?
  - techblueberry 5mo ago
    All of the articles and CFO’s saying so, and companies like Uber cutting back on AI spend.
    - simonw 5mo ago
      Uber cutting back to ~$1,500/engineer/tool/month makes it look to me like they think there's at least $1,500 of monthly ROI to be had per engineer.
      - NichoPaolucci 5mo ago
        1500/Mo per engineer is such a small price considering the base salary of these employees, Maybe Uber knows something we don't (the 5X engineering ROI isn't there for them?). Judging the ROI of an engineer is hard. Adding AI on top of that makes things worse, I think. I've heard AI makes engineers 3X, 5X, 10X and even 100X. If I told my CEO that I was 4X more effective with AI, I am doubtful he would be willing to spend even 1X my salary on tokens. Even though he would be making out in the end. At some point the ROI is pretty much vibes, man.
      - techblueberry 5mo ago
        So touche, but since it's usage per task it's kind of weird. This means that the average engineer is efficient at (say) identifying the first 10 tasks they should do but there are diminishing returns after that? That seems like a weird pattern. Wouldn't it be more likely that certain tasks have a ROI based on how efficient the task is generated? Like I'm trying to imagine in my head, if you think an engineer is more efficient with the tool, why deny them more tokens. I guess so they think to use them more efficiently? So, maybe I conclude that I think your conclusion that there must be $1500 per engineer is flawed. And even if it were true, I don't think the benefit would be evenly distributed. I suspect this is a first pass at figuring how to budget them and there will be a second pass. While it certainly reeks of motivated reasoning, Jensen Huang assertion that an expensive engineer should be using at least their salary in tokens feels more logically sound to me (assuming the average engineer is efficient at using tokens, I have a feeling it's a normal distribution)
maplethorpe 5mo ago
> Which other tool went from nothing to this level of acceptance so quickly? NFTs? My company had nothing to do with blockchain but I ended up working on NFT integration regardless.
tikhonj 5mo ago
I still believe Scrum is a fad and yet companies have been spending obscene amounts on to push it down developers' throats for decades now.
- therealdrag0 5mo ago
  Scrum spending is very rare IMO. No company I have worked at pays anything for scrum.
perlgeek 5mo ago
As a side note, I wonder when we'll hear the first reports about employees reselling (parts of) their token budget. Probably not worth it risking your job for a 200$/month good, but at 5K, I'm sure some folks will be tempted. Especially if companies do stupid things like token usage leaderboards.

anthonypasq 5mo ago

perhaps the personal computer? Companies were spending 3-5k (10-15k inflation adjusted) on every employee for just hardware. everyone making comparisons to the dotcom bubble seems misguided. this is clearly computing 2.0 imo

thewebguyd 5mo ago
No disagreement on computing 2.0, but companies spending 3-5k per employee for hardware isn't generally a monthly cost. It's a at the time of hire, and then once every 3 to 5 years after that, for a monthly amortized cost of about $50/employee. I have my concerns with current inference pricing in that there's a non-zero possibility for a rug pull in the future for the subscription plans for organizations and individuals that can still use them. For now, its only companies larger than ~150 users that need to pay per token, but what if that wasn't the case? Not every company can afford over $1k/month/employee to give them access to AI tooling, further making it harder to compete against the behemoths. If we get to a point where an individual can no longer pay $100/month for nearly unlimited usage and instead must pay per token, that's going to be a problem. Personal computing eventually became an equalizer (until we started centralizing on mainframes again, aka the cloud) because it got cheap. My hope is that inference also gets just as, if not cheaper. I have high hopes for local AI and open weight models and we will continue the ethos of local, personal computing and not needing to offload everything to OpenAI/Anthropic/Google, etc. to get work done once the hardware and hardware availability catch up.
- dghlsakjg 5mo ago
  Every employee doesn't need $1k in token spend per month, either. That kind of spend makes sense for technical workers in r+d. Most other workers are served fine by $20-30 worth of tokens on a budget model. You don't need Opus to help support write emails.
  - tmp10423288442 5mo ago
    No, but you do want Opus-tier models to do desktop and office software automation (think about people who intensely use Excel and the like). Actually those might take even more tokens that coding in a lot of cases. Why do you think Claude Cowork is successful, and why do you think Codex is leaning so hard into Computer use?
    - dghlsakjg 5mo ago
      I wonder if you will see app makers begin to open APIs (MCPs) up in ways that replace computer use. Computer use via human interfaces is pretty hacky IME, and if you can use an app that exposes spreadsheets in a way that reduces token costs by 90%. I'm optimistic that the demand for AI accessibility will drive programmatic interfaces in places where companies were previously reluctant to.
- GrinningFool 5mo ago
  Any kind of rug-pull is a serious concern. Companies are re-orienting their entire development processes around these tools. Sure they can go back, but it will require a much larger and more expensive effort than to transition in the first place. All companies who make this transition will be more or less at the mercy of model providers.
jghn 5mo ago
Two things can be true at the same time. It can be true that this is here to stay. It can also be true that companies are grossly overvalued right now and that the market is irrationally exuberant. This would mean we could both have a crash and also see AI coding be the new future.
pixelesque 5mo ago
Hardware's not generally a subscription, monthly cost though. You update it for them every 3/4 years (if they're lucky). It probably makes a bit more sense to compare it to existing software subscriptions like Office, or the old-school 'per-seat' licenses per user for software.
- thewebguyd 5mo ago
  There's some software that can cost $1k or more per seat/month, but it's pretty rare. Big tier ERPs usually fall in the ~$600/seat/moth range, specialty engineering stuff can hit over $1k, Bloomberg terminal, etc. I wonder if what Uber's building with that $1.5k/month/employee is actually delivering the same value that something like an ERP would to the entire org...
pmg101 5mo ago
I think the right comparison is the invention of the microprocessor. At that time people were grappling with a lot of the same things we are today - would it automate jobs away, would it transform education and the work place, etc.
dghlsakjg 5mo ago
The Dotcom bubble is an interesting comparison. The general thrust that everything would be online was correct, it was just that the market mistimed and misallocated of capital by a decade or more. There was massive spending on infrastructure capacity that we wouldn't end up needing until the 2010s. There were hype driven valuations completely disconnected from business fundamentals just because a company was an 'internet' company. Things were going from cutting edge to obsolete in less than a year. There were breathless promises that this was business 2.0! Of course, none of that sounds remotely like what is going on today... I'm optimistic about AI, but I also don't think that it is going to change everything as fast as promised.
- threetonesun 5mo ago
  The question you always have to ask is what problems does it directly solve. I personally think most of the current problems in software development and really the world at large are not time-bound problems but alignment issues, and all an LLM can really do there is be some 3rd party oracle that gives you an answer without needing other humans to agree with you.
  - rafterydj 5mo ago
    I agree with you. I think that if we're talking about actual reliable problem solving, we have to be discussing robotic / drone systems. Software is as complex as you want to make it, and always has been.
  - squidbeak 5mo ago
    > The question you always have to ask is what problems does it directly solve Most directly, human labour. Labour is always a problem for capital. At a certain level of AI competence, businesses don't need to pay humans to complete the work they need doing in order to operate. I don't think anyone would dispute AI competence isn't growing steadily.

agumonkey 5mo ago

I would use these exact facts as a sign that it's maybe not what it seems. It's much too big and too fast to feel stable. It might keep at that level, increase even more, or drop down to a saner level of use / allocation.

johnfn 5mo ago
So it might either go up, stay the same, or go down? :)
- agumonkey 5mo ago
  heh yeah, i'm also selling trading advice :p
teeray 5mo ago
I can see a corporate future where tokens are haggled over in department budgets just like any other line item. Some projects will get more of them, other projects will get less of them. "Use AI for everything" will become "use AI economically and build things that outlast our budget for it."
- mekael 5mo ago
  Neat fact, those kind of conversations are already happening at ${DAY_JOB}.
Aurornis 5mo ago
> It might keep at that level, increase even more, or drop down Bold prediction. :) I think anyone predicting a drop or near-term flattening is not thinking beyond the online bubbles where these tools are discussed. In a local tech meetup a lot of the normal companies are barely coming online with AI tools at their company, and even then with very low limits.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

tokioyoyo 5mo ago

“AI coding is a fad” is not just one big camp of similar-minded people. Different groups have to give up on their pre-existing beliefs in order to be ok with AI coding. Think of people who were very strict with variable names. People who pushed for multiple-levels deep of abstractions for a single API logic that’s not going to be reused. People who believed that coding is craft, rather than just a process to get to the end during work hours. This makes most of these people’s points more-or-less moot. I was in some of those camps, but I’ve seen coding evolve in the last 15 years. So I understand that these priors need to be updated, as most arguments don’t apply to today’s world.

fragmede 5mo ago
What's an int vs a float vs a boolean? What's a function? What's a class? What's a variable? You don't actually need to know the answer to those questions in order to vibe code. That's a lot of priors to update!
- tokioyoyo 5mo ago
  Just to go on record, as of today, I’m a big believer that a person that knows all that stuff is much more productive with AI-coding than a person who doesn’t. I have no idea how we can get people motivated to learn these through trial-and-error when AI coding exists though. I remember the days of spending hours on stupid bugs that AI can resolve within a minute. But I recall learning heavily from those experiences. Oh well…
  - mewpmewp2 5mo ago
    I honestly feel like my own learning has accelerated after using AI. Simply because now it's so easy to write the same thing in so many different languages, I can e.g. learn pros and cons of each language, which otherwise would have been I think unfathomable to me. I have now created so much stuff I wouldn't have had time to create. I setup k3s, and tons of what would be otherwise unnecessarily complicated stuff on my laptop for my side projects with additional home servers, smart house stuff. Otherwise k8s and things like that would have been daunting to learn and in theory and without constant professional exposure, etc... Microservices in Go, Rust, which I didn't have any previous experience with, games in C and other languages. Didn't know anything about low level memory management before. Was just mainly TypeScript person. Just constantly building random fun stuff.

OptionOfT 5mo ago

Because companies are betting that this spending will allow them to reduce cost by firing people. Right now the AI LLM PRs we're seeing are just introducing more work for other people, while these so-called builders are looking good with their new dashboards and functionality they're demoing. But you can't talk to them about the flow of the code. You can't ask them for their thinking as to why certain things are. It's not built up from the ground with experience from x people taken into account. It's materialized from nothing, with no foundational separation, and barely any abstractions. No one wants to touch it. The PRs are too large, and the 'authors' of the PRs aren't on call with us. They get all the glory, but do none of the work. It's kinda like designing a house and then sending it to an architect and engineer saying: make this work.

saulpw 5mo ago
> But you can't talk to them about the flow of the code. You can't ask them for their thinking as to why certain things are. You can absolutely do this. It's even right most of the time.
- datsci_est_2015 5mo ago
  I believe the “them” the OP was talking about was referring to the people opening the PRs, not the LLMs.
  - saulpw 5mo ago
    My mistake, that is definitely a different scene.
- chmod775 5mo ago
  Let's be real. Most of the time you ask an LLM "Why did you do it like this?", it responds with something along the lines of "Oops. My bad. You're right to point this out." You even have a fair chance of getting a response like that when there isn't anything wrong and the question wasn't rhetorical - which perfectly illustrates the level of the genuine understanding LLMs operate at.

Barrin92 5mo ago

>Why there are so many people that still believe that AI coding is a fad? Because there's not a single piece of evidence that this has improved the quality of the delivered software, or for that matter even the speed of features any of these companies produce, in fact if anything the opposite. The point of software development, the hint is in the name, is to develop software, not consume tokens. If Uber was now full of 10x engineers the stock price of Uber would be up, not down on a yearly basis. Hilariously enough the only company whose stock price is up appears to be Antrophic

sirsinsalot 5mo ago
How dare you mention evidence! This isn't engineering you know!
tuesdaynight 5mo ago
I don't believe that the quality is the best metric for these companies. I doubt that Google has top-notch code quality in every product they developed, but it does not matter if they are making billions per month. Furthermore, I honestly believe that the quality stayed the same, at least.

lbrito 5mo ago

That's just a non sequitur. "companies are already paying thousands per seat" has zero correlation with something being a fad or not. There are much more reasonable rationales explaining why companies are acting the way they are than "because AI coding is not a fad"

tmp10423288442 5mo ago
Can you name a service that charged companies thousands/seat/month that turned out to be almost or completely useless? There's lots of random services sold to corporates that are not very useful (all the random benefits besides health care, life insurance, and other big-ticket items), but the per-seat charge of those is much smaller.
- edent 5mo ago
  Google Jam Board (and other digital whiteboards) had high upfront capex and lowish opex. Probably close to the price for how often they were used before being killed off. Same with the MS surface(?) tables (not tablets). I saw load of companies buy into the hype and then discard.
- mike_hock 5mo ago
  Every consultant ever, but to be fair that's not per seat.
  - LtWorf 5mo ago
    Hey I'm a consultant. They pay me to be a regular developer but they cannot hire since they just fired thousands of people which they apparently did need, turns out.
- marcosdumay 5mo ago
  There are so many. Can I start with Oracle databases?
  - therealdrag0 5mo ago

toasty228 5mo ago

There is a whole spectrum between "ai coding is a fad" and "unlimited tokens for every employees we don't even care if it actually ends up being a net positive financially"

tmp10423288442 5mo ago
> "unlimited tokens for every employees we don't even care if it actually ends up being a net positive financially" That was clearly a short-term trend that would obviously get fixed. Doesn't say much about AI coding as a business model.

jbvlkt 5mo ago

Because writing huge amounts of code is easy for humans too. Agents already proved that they can do it. But are agents able to maintain it? I do not know and unless I know for sure, I am not fully committing to AI generated code. i.e. I am able to write about 1k lines of code of "acceptable" quality per week. Which means in 1 year, there will be about 5Ok LoC. I am pretty sure, that I would have to spent like 60-80% of time to maintain 1st year code and the rest to make new features in the second year so I would have to hire more people and spent time to onboard them to maintain velocity. All of that are rough estimates, probably overoptimistic and way worse in 3rd year. Good luck doing such estimates with code agents. Even worse if you already have huge amounts of legacy code.

jujube3 5mo ago

It's cope. People desperately want to believe that AI coding is going away so that they can go back to partying like it's 2020. So there's a huge number of HN posters claiming that the price of tokens will go UP over time rather than down (that's how Moore's Law works, right???) or that code bases that AI contributes to will spontaneously combust, or something.

dofm 5mo ago
I don't think it is unreasonable to say both will happen, is it? In the long term, tokens will fall in price. Obviously. (If "tokens" continues to be the unit) In the short to medium term, for the IPOs to succeed, people have to start actually paying for what they are using, so the price will go up, and is going up, quite a lot. Once their value is set they will slowly fall from that point (or some point maybe halfway, depending on how much the market is willing to continue to subsidise). I am an AI cynic, but I am now an informed cynic; I am learning agentic tools so I know where they are useful and I know my enemy. I think the "fad" here is cloud-based, metered AI being a dominant work mode. Nothing, so far, has suggested to me that any other outcome is likely than edge- to local-scale, on-device, on-laptop, on-prem models getting good enough to the point where people use them by default and use the cloud models only when they need the extra oomph. I cannot believe that there is anything other than an enormous incentive for companies like Uber to find local, small model and on-premises solutions to their problems, not least while pricing is so changeable and people are getting nasty surprises. Betting on OpenAI and Anthropic being around over the long term in the form that they are now, that feels like valley hopium. Utility monopolies essentially always derive from physical/geograpical limitations, don't they?
- jujube3 5mo ago
  I mean, there's an "enormous incentive" for people to run their own data centers rather than using AWS. And yet, cloud is growing and on-premise is shrinking. While I hope local AI continues to exist, I'm skeptical that it will take over, for the same reason running your own servers hasn't taken over. It's just hard, and involves spending huge sums of money up front. It's also not really clear how much tokens are being subsidized. The discussion reminds me of Uber. For years people on HN claimed that Uber was going to collapse once they ran out of VC money. Then... that never happened, and everyone just moved on to discussing other things.

themafia 5mo ago

Why are there so many people who mistake simple anecdotes for actionable data? Why do the majority of businesses fail rather than succeed?

LAC-Tech 5mo ago

Because we have spent a lot of time and money using AI to generate code and have been unimpressed with the results. As for why they got accepted so quickly 1) the industry's long running desperation to deskill computer programming 2) the addictive psychology baked into LLMs "That's an elegant solution! Shall I ... ?"

asadotzler 5mo ago
Also, a bucket for VC to put all that NFT, IoT, blockchain, VR investment into. VCs gonna VC and the last 15 years of bets failed so the last few years have been a transition away from those toward "the next thing".

javier2 5mo ago

Because the vibe coded stuff is sometimes great, sometimes it breaks stuff, sometimes it breaks things that we fixed multiple times earlier. The PRs are too large, nobody can review that mess and you better be on call for your deployment. Maybe it will get better, maybe not. I dont know yet.

therealdrag0 5mo ago
What about that means AI coding is a fad?
marcosdumay 5mo ago
Oh, it won't get any better. LLMs already trained on every bit of code ever published, they won't get any more material.
- throwatdem12311 5mo ago
  If anything the snake is eating it’s own tail because now it’s training on vast amounts of its new slop…dragging down the average bar of quality.
- therealdrag0 5mo ago
  They can be reinforced with best practices and context windows etc will increase.
Gigachad 5mo ago
The massive PRs is something that probably has to end. You can ai generate smaller changes in reviewable PR sizes. It probably even helps the AI code review tools to break the work in to smaller logical chunks too.
- javier2 5mo ago
  Yes you can, and this is still the most realistic use of AI llms, but this is a 2x multiplier, not 10x or 20x

sirsinsalot 5mo ago

Fear of loss to competitors embracing a technology creates a fear driven adoption. Let me ask you this: is any technology worth so much break-neck adoption without first seeing clear evidence of ROI? No. The adoption is irrational.

anamexis 5mo ago
What makes you think there is no clear evidence of ROI?
- techblueberry 5mo ago
  All of the articles and CFO’s saying so, and companies like Uber cutting back on AI spend.
  - simonw 5mo ago
    Uber cutting back to ~$1,500/engineer/tool/month makes it look to me like they think there's at least $1,500 of monthly ROI to be had per engineer.
    - NichoPaolucci 5mo ago
      1500/Mo per engineer is such a small price considering the base salary of these employees, Maybe Uber knows something we don't (the 5X engineering ROI isn't there for them?). Judging the ROI of an engineer is hard. Adding AI on top of that makes things worse, I think. I've heard AI makes engineers 3X, 5X, 10X and even 100X. If I told my CEO that I was 4X more effective with AI, I am doubtful he would be willing to spend even 1X my salary on tokens. Even though he would be making out in the end. At some point the ROI is pretty much vibes, man.
    - techblueberry 5mo ago
      So touche, but since it's usage per task it's kind of weird. This means that the average engineer is efficient at (say) identifying the first 10 tasks they should do but there are diminishing returns after that? That seems like a weird pattern. Wouldn't it be more likely that certain tasks have a ROI based on how efficient the task is generated? Like I'm trying to imagine in my head, if you think an engineer is more efficient with the tool, why deny them more tokens. I guess so they think to use them more efficiently? So, maybe I conclude that I think your conclusion that there must be $1500 per engineer is flawed. And even if it were true, I don't think the benefit would be evenly distributed. I suspect this is a first pass at figuring how to budget them and there will be a second pass. While it certainly reeks of motivated reasoning, Jensen Huang assertion that an expensive engineer should be using at least their salary in tokens feels more logically sound to me (assuming the average engineer is efficient at using tokens, I have a feeling it's a normal distribution)

maplethorpe 5mo ago

> Which other tool went from nothing to this level of acceptance so quickly? NFTs? My company had nothing to do with blockchain but I ended up working on NFT integration regardless.

tikhonj 5mo ago

I still believe Scrum is a fad and yet companies have been spending obscene amounts on to push it down developers' throats for decades now.

therealdrag0 5mo ago
Scrum spending is very rare IMO. No company I have worked at pays anything for scrum.

perlgeek 5mo ago

As a side note, I wonder when we'll hear the first reports about employees reselling (parts of) their token budget. Probably not worth it risking your job for a 200$/month good, but at 5K, I'm sure some folks will be tempted. Especially if companies do stupid things like token usage leaderboards.