Didn’t realize this was science fiction.
I've seen non-technical people vibe code with agents. They're capable of producing janky, very basic CRUD apps. Code cost definitely ain't zero
And how much is technical debt worth?
I'm not sure carpet bombing every thread with AI misinformation is going to stop the forward progress of this technology, but they're giving it their best shot.
Your whole history is AI psychosis btw, seek help.
Like saying they can't generate compiling code in this very thread?
They never refuse. Worst case scenario the good models ask for clarification.
The cost for producing code is zero and code producers are in a really bad spot.
One could argue we could achieve the same goals by appending \n to a file in a loop, but this is inefficient nowadays with generous token offerings (but could change in the future than I highly suggest just outputting \n to a file an call it productivity increase)
I didn't understand your point about product owners. Who the fuck would ever need one when code produces itself?
Zero as long as your time is worth nothing, and bad code and security issues cost you nothing maybe.
"Getting code" has always been dead simple and cheap. Getting actually good code that works and doesn't turn into a problem for you down the road is the expensive part
i can't remember who said it but a long time ago i remember reading "Linux is free if your time is worthless". Now we all use Linux one way or the other.
Maybe one day LLMs will eventually make good code at a low cost, and that will allow non-programmers to write programs with few problems but the cost will never be zero, and I think we're a long long way from making human programers obsolete.
All of the intelligence that LLMs mimic came directly from the work of human minds which got fed into them, but what LLMs output is a lossy conversion filled with error and hallucination.
My guess is that the LLMs producing code will improve for a short time, but as they start to slurp up more and more of their own slop they'll start performing worse.
I think builders are gonna be fine. The type of programmer were people would put up with just because they could really go in their cave for a few days and come out with a bug fix that nobody else on the team could figure out is going to have a hard time.
Interestingly AI coding is really good at that sort of thing and less good at fully grasping user requirements or big picture systems. Basically things that we had to sit in meetings a lot for.
Amen. It was a good time while it lasted.
So the type of programmers you're talking about, who could solve complex problems, are actually just enhanced by it.
This is the time for bold predictions, you’ve just told us we’re in a crucible moment yet you end the article passively….
- Small companies using AI are going to kick the sh*t out of large companies that are slow to adapt.
- LLMs will penetrate more areas of our lives. Closer to the STTNG computer. They will be agents in the real life sense and possibly in the physical world as well (robots).
- ASICs will eat nVidia's lunch.
- We will see an explosion of software and we will also see more jobs for people who are able to maintain all this software (using AI tools). There is going to be a lot more custom software for very specific purposes.
Big companies are sales machines and their products have been terrible for ages. Microsoft enjoys the top spot in software sales only due to their sales staff pushing impossible deals every year.
With this moat reduced I think you'll find this approach doesn't work any more. The smaller companies will also hire the good sales people away.
Microsoft survived (and even, for a little while, dominated) after missing the web. Netscape didn't eat its lunch.
Then Google broke out on a completely different front.
Now there's billions of dollars of investment in "AI", hoping to break out like the next Google... while competing directly with Google.
(This is why we should be more ambitious about constraining large companies and billionaires.)
2026 is the year where we all realise that we can be our own company and build the stuff in our dreams rather than the mundane crap we do at work.
Honestly I am optimistic about computing in general. Llms will open things up for novices and experts alike. We can move into I the fields where we can use our brain power... But all we need is enough memory and compute to control our destiny....
Not sure how to prove it to you.
Start? Excuse moi
Do you know how hard it to make a successful company or even make money? Its like saying any actor can goto hollywood and be a star
VCs wont fund everyone
Nobody is sure of anything
> Do you know how hard it to make a successful company or even make money?
Yes I have failed to do it before. I get this.
> VCs wont fund everyone
And? Do you need VCs? Economics mean that scale matters but what if we don't need it. What if we can make efficient startups with our own funding??
If you are part of the requirements process. If you find problems to solve and solve them. If you push back on requirements when they are not reasonable. Etc. Then you still have a career and I don't see anything coming for you soon.
So, in your entire career, you've always worked in companies where you were a subject matter expert on everything the company did? Always knew the business domain inside out? You were running the numbers, sitting with customers, and determining yourself what they really wanted?
> If you push back on requirements when they are not reasonable. Etc
I did, because the requirements had a cost, which I had to balance with limited resources.
If widget A would make 10 customers happy, but would cost two weeks of work, that could be better spent making widget B that'd make 20 customers happy, then it would not be reasonable.
If widget A and B are free, then it becomes unreasonable to say no.
So far it's just AI doom posting, hype bloggers that haven't shipped anything, anecdotes without evidence, increase in CVEs, increase in outages, and degraded software quality.
I only have anecdotal evidence from some engineers I know that they don't write software by hand any more. Provided the software they are working on was useful before, we can say that LLMs are writing useful software now.
Tokens are free now?
That is a true statement. Might not be much, but is enough for you to produce some code and shit out a readme and then show on hacker news that your capable of pushing to git with the help of llms
Sure, the tiny rushes of dopamine are free, but that's just enough to get your foot into the door and pretty soon they won't hit the same. If you don't quit while you're ahead, it's either gonna financially ruin you or turn you into a zombie that never uses its brain for an extended period of time and you end up writing posts like this one to self-rationalise your completely irrational behaviour because you've been scared into thinking your career is gonna be ruined if you don't keep diving head-first into this addiction.
Not a coincidence that this is happening at the same time as "bet on anything" apps.
The Pollyanas have a point but overstate it. The naysayers should be more cautious though.
It hasn't. Large enterprises currently footing the bill, essentially subsidizing AI for now.
I constantly see comparisons between the 200$ Claude-Code Max subscription vs 6-figure (100k$) salary of an engineer.
The comparison here is, first of all, not apples-to-apples. Let's correct CC subscription to the yearly amount first; 12x200=2400$. Still more than 10x difference compared to the human engineer.
Although when you have the human engineer, you also pay for the experience, responsibility, and you somewhat transfer liability (especially when regulations come into play)
Moreover, creation by a human engineer, unless stolen IP or was plagiarized, owned by you as the employer/company. Meanwhile, whatever AI generated is guaranteed to be somewhat plagiarized in the first place. The ownership of the IP is questionable.
This is like when a layman complains when the electrician comes to their house, identifies the breaker problem, replaces the breaker which costs 5$ and charges 100$ for 10-minute job. Which is complete underestimation of skill, experience, and safety. A wrong one may cause constant circuit-breaks, causing malfunction in multitude of electronic devices in the household. Or worse, may cause a fire. When you think you paid 100$ for 10-minutes, in fact it was years of education, exams, certification, and experience you had paid for your future safety.
The same principle applies to the AI. It seems like it had accumulated more and more experience, but failing at the first prompt-injection. It seems like getting better at benchmarks because they are now part of their dataset. All these are hidden-costs 99% does not talk about. All these hidden costs are liabilities.
You may save an engineer's yearly salary today, at the cost of losing ten times more to the civil-lawsuits tomorrow. (Of course, depending on a field/business)
If your business was not that critical to get a civil-lawsuit in the first place, then you probably didn't needed to hire an engineer yourself. You could hire an agency/contractor to do that in much cheaper way, while still sharing liability...
like ok the cost for anyone to generate almost always working code has dropped to zero but how does a lay person verify the code satisfies business logic? asking the same set to generate tests to that just seems to move the goalposts
or like what happens when the next few years of junior engineers (or whatever replaces programming as a field)who’ve been spoon fed coding through LLMs need to actually decipher LLM output and pinpoint something the machine can’t get right after hours of prompting? a whole generation blindly following a tool they cant reliably control?
but maybe I am just coping because it feels like the ladder on the rest of my already short career , but some humility m