In an idealized market economy that would be the case. But it is far from ideal. Your individual incentive as a SWE is to write more code.

Alternatively, we'll see a drop in deployment diversity, with more and more functionality shifted to centralised providers that have economies of scale and the resources to optimise.

E.g. IDEs could continue to demand lots of CPU/RAM, and cloud providers are able to deliver that cheaper than a mostly idle desktop.

If that happens, more and more of its functionality will come to rely on having low datacenter latencies, making use on desktops less viable.

Who will realistically be optimising build times for usecases that don't have sub-ms access to build caches, and when those build caches are available, what will stop the median program from having even larger dependency graphs.

Some Soviet humor will help you understand the true course of events:

A dad comes home and tells his kid, “Hey, vodka’s more expensive now.” “So you’re gonna drink less?” “Nope. You’re gonna eat less.”

I have some hope for transpiling to become more commonplace. What would happen if you could write in Python, but trivially transpile to C++ and back?

Big companies secure long-term pricing (multi-year), so iPhones probably won’t feel this in 2026 (or even 2027).

2028 is another story depending on whether this frenzy continues / fabs being built (don’t know whether they are as hard as cpu)

Asus is ramping up production of ram...

So lets see if they might "save us"

> they'll quickly be wondering if ChatGPT is worth this cost

They should be, and the answer is obviously no—at least to them. No political or business leader has outlined a concrete, plausible path to the sort of vague UBI utopia that's been promised for "regular folks" in the bullish scenario (AGI, ASI, etc.), nor have they convincingly argued that this isn't an insane bubble that's going to cripple our economy when AGI doesn't happen—a scenario that's looking more and more likely every day.

There is no upside and only downside; whether we're heading for sci-fi apocalypse or economic catastrophe, the malignant lunatics pushing this technology expect to be insulated from consequences whether they end up owning the future light-cone of humanity or simply enjoying the cushion of their vast wealth while the majority suffers the consequences of an economic crash a few rich men caused by betting it all, even what wasn't theirs to bet.

Everybody should be fighting this tooth and nail. Even if these technologies are useful (I believe they are), and even if they can be made into profitable products and sustainable businesses, what's happening now isn't related to any of that.

I hope they do. We live in a time of incredibly centralized wealth & power and AI and particularly "the machine god" has the potential to make things 100x worse and return us to a feudal system if the ownership and profits all go to a few capital owners.

> At this current pace, if "the electorate" doesn't see real benefits to any of this. 2028 is going to be referendum on AI unfortunately.

Not saying this is necessarily a bad prediction for 2028, but I'm old enough to remember when the 2020 election was going to be a referendum on billionaires and big tech monopolies.

For good measure, a bunch of this is funded through money taken directly from the electorates taxes and given to a few select companies, whose leaders then graciously donate to the latest Ballroom grift. Micron, so greedy they thought nothing of shutting down their consumer brand even when it costs them nothing at all, got $6B in Chips Act money in 2024.