Posted by GavinAnderegg 4 days ago
Can anyone name one single widely-used digital product that does _not_ have to be precisely correct/compatible/identical to The Original and that everyone _does_ pay $200/month for?
Therefore, should prices that users pay get anywhere even close to that number, there will naturally be opportunities for competitors to bring prices down to a reasonable level.
As to the nailgun thing, that's an interesting analogy, I'm actually building my own house right now entirely with hand tools, it's on track to finish in 1/5 the time some of this mcmansions do with 1/100th of the cost because I'm building what I actually need and not screwing around with stuff for business reasons. I think you'll find software projects are more similar to that than you'd expect.
My point was not that AI will necessarily be cheaper to run than $200, but that there is not much profit to be made. Of course the cost of inference will form a lower bound on the price as well.
If we all go that way, there might be no new haskells and webassemblies in the future.
"given a grammar manual for Kalamang, a language with fewer than 200 speakers worldwide, the model learns to translate English to Kalamang at a similar level to a person who learned from the same content"
Source: Gemini 1.5's paper from March 2024 https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini/gemini_...
Wow. It really is like a ridiculous, over-confident, *very* junior developer.
Solo developer doing small jobs but I code every day and $10 per month would be a busy month for me. I still read every line of code though..
* It's not clear on how much revenue or new customers is generated by using a coding agent
* It's not clear on how things are going on production. There's only talks about development in the article
I feel ai coding agents will give you the edge. Just this article doesn't talk about revenue or PnL side of things, just perceived costs saved from not employing an engineer.
It will instead sign a deal with Microsoft for ai that is 'good enough' and limit expensive ai to some. Or being in the big consultancys as usual to do the projects.
In my experience, o4-mini-high is good enough, even just through the chat interface
Cursor et al can be more comfy because they have access to the files directly. But when working on a sufficiently large/old/complex code base, the main limitation is the human in the loop and managing context, so things end up evening out. Not only that, but a lot of times it’s just easier/better to manually feed things to ChatGPT/Claude - that way you get to more carefully curate and understand the tasks and the changes
I still haven’t seen any convincing real life scenario with larger in-production code bases in which agents are able to autonomously write most of the code
If anyone has a video/demo, would love to see it
Also, local agents miss context all the time, at which point you need to manually start adding/managing the context anyway
And, if you are regularly working on the codebase, at some point you’ll probably have better in-brain initial context than the agent
A breakpoint in a debugger is much much quicker than feeding the AI all the context needed and then confirming it didn’t miss some flow in some highly abstract code
Everyone time I try it I find it to be useless compared to Claude or Gemini.
Having typing skills >= 120 wpm will triple your efficacy.