Zero if you dont consider Anthropic's API pricing, the prompter's hourly rate and verification bottleneck.

However, let's suppose the alternate case:

If AI works as claimed, people in their tens of millions will be out of work.

New jobs won't be created quickly enough to keep them occupied (and fed).

Billionaires own the media and the social media and will use it to attempt to prevent change (i.e. apocalyptic taxation)

What, then, will those people do? Well, they say "the devil makes work for idle hands", and I'm curious what that's going to look like.

Furthermore if we were truly in the utopia the author describes, why do all the LLM companies employ (and pay top dollar) for so many engineers? Why does OpenAI pay for slack when they could just vibe code a chat app in an hour?

The challenge of building a real, valuable software business (or any business) is so much harder than using LLM to prompt “build me a successful software business”

Then go and throw your $0 to fix some real bugs on GitHub.. really, if AI works so well, why are all those issues still open?

Look, almost 2K issues open here: https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues

If AI really works like non-technical people think it does, why doesn't Google just throw their AI tool to fix them all?

Playing software maintainer while many vibe coded web apps aren't built with proper software architecture or practices only makes the swing back to senior engineers being in demand a possibility.

Good luck to those who are building 600K-LOC vibe coded web apps with 40+ APIs stitched together.

Whatever you produce, nobody is going to use unless you produce it under the banner of Big Tech. There are no real opportunities for real founders.

The problem is spreading beyond software. The other day, I found out there is a billion dollar company whose main product is a sponge... Yes, a sponge, for cleaning. We're fast moving towards a communist-like centrally planned economy, but with a facade of meritocracy where there is only one product of each kind and no room for competition.

This feeling of doom that software engineers started to feel after LLMs is how I was feeling 5 years earlier. People are confused because they think the problem is that AI is automating them but reality is that our problems arise from a deeper systemic issue at the core of our economic system. AI is just a convenient cover story, it's not the reason why we are doomed. Once people accept that we can start to work towards a political solution like UBI or better...

We've reached the conclusion of Goodhart's Law "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" - Our economic system has been so heavily monitored and controlled in every aspect that is has begun to fail in every aspect. Somebody has managed to profit from every blindspot, every exploit exposed by the measurement and control apparatus. Everything is getting qualitatively worse in every way that is not explicitly measured and the measurement apparatus is becoming increasingly unreliable... Most problems we're experiencing are what people experienced during the fall of communism except filter bubbles are making us completely blind to the experience of other people.

I think if we don't address the root causes, things will get worse for everyone. People's problems will get bigger, become highly personalized, pervasive, inexplicable, unrelatable. Everyone will waste their energy trying to resolve their own experience of the symptoms but the root causes would remain.

Software isnt going to become more economically valuable its going to be used to replace economic inputs of labor with units of compute.

Its entirely intended to take humans out of the equation or devalue human labor and it always has. Dont be a fool.