Posted by zhubert 2 days ago
We are moving into a weird time where people are assuming that now we have to pay machines churn out code.
Somehow they packaged up our own ability to think and are selling it back to us. If they can get us to forget how to do it we'll be the perfect customers, dependent forever.
Even then I think a LOT of people are saying something but the narrative mechanism of inevitability is really strong.
not gonna change
still gonna get paid $300k+ for it
Just continue down the path of making it so only the oligarchs can afford to access them, power them, and buy capable hardware to run them locally.
Also helps the oligarchs to have their government assets issue impossible restrictions like “no foreigners can access” that isn’t technically outlawing models for everyone.
That's assuming that the code base in question is still well maintained and designed. If this were to happen I would bet that heavily vibe coded things - like Bun and Claude Code - would pretty much immediately hit a wall, where humans just can't comprehend the accumulated mess well enough to make productive changes.
Plenty of people spent lots of time of their career essentially cleaning up code and refactoring after others. Yes it'd be a lot, but there are really giant spaghetti's out there that been 100% built by humans, then conquered by refactorers.
Most likely that would cause company pulling the rug on their frontier model(s), to fall over themselves. Meanwhile the competition keeps going. Hence no top AI player does that unless forced to.
Personally, I think when theres this much money involved the psychosis would only intensify.
I wonder how much money is actually involved?
I don't think someone without coding experience can do it though. I've accepted that the new expected output for a single dev will eventually converge to 10x-100x what it is now.
For what? Why would you need to?
> I've created a 1.1m+ loc and growing trading platform that automates options trades based on live ML edges from research papers.
Sounds like a lot of "if/else" /j
Why are you here writing comments kn HN? (Instead of counting money and investing it?)
I'm just curious, don't get me wrong.
your supposed "honest" inquiry is if you are so smart why arnt you rich yet?
I don't really think they are packaging up ability to think abd selling it back to you. There is nothing stopping you from not using AI and even companies, many firms just dont trust AI and don't use it.
But the idea that code could be built of thin air is not true in case of actual businesses.
The AI provider gets paid, the platform gets paid (20% is a lot in my opinion!), and the maintainer gets more unpaid work: another PR to plan, review, revise, merge, and then maintain... that's a lot of work.
If people are willing to fund an issue, why should that money mainly cover LLM tokens rather than maintainer effort? Or at least, why doesn't the leftover money go to the maintainer instead of back to the donors?
sounds like you do not support other people that have nothing to do with the code that you like
Regarding rewarding maintainer effort, I'm shooting for the value prop of "free AI", this only works if reconciliation is per-phase and liquidity is accessible across as many repos as possible. So if I had each reconcile drain the pool, there would be a lot of stalled work and human intervention required.
That said, there are probably some maintainers that don't want "free AI" and that's okay.
Do you have a source for this? I believe “personal subscription” plans on OpenAI and Anthropic are likely ran at a net loss or close to it, but all indications elsewhere are that API pricing for these companies and likely Google as well are profitable per API call [1][2]. I would definitely believe that the Chinese players are operating at a loss though if that is what you mean.
[1] https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/anthropic-growth-and-b...
[2] https://martinalderson.com/posts/are-openai-and-anthropic-re...
As an aside, when you do login, CleverCrow shows projects that you've starred on GitHub to help find things you might want to support.
I suppose this is the most common scenario - I doubt features are not getting implemented because maintainers are lacking tokens.
How are you handling the token allocation under the hood, is this managed via a GitHub App integration, and can backers target specific issues or just the repo as a whole?
If this gets any traction, the "share tokens with a friend" could be good PR for the labs, instead of buy me a coffee, buy me a clanker.
If you want that, negotiate a contract.
But instead we have these attempts and stopgaps, some of which have had some success here and there. This is something else in that pool making it easier to fund stuff, and if it gains traction than we'll know that it's serving its purpose. I think it has good potential.
I'm thinking about the far more random regular people using random projects that may not be that popular. Like I just did a rough count of the OSS apps on my phone: 60+. Of those there are 5 that I can immediately think of improvements that I'd like. One of them I've actually made improvements to already because it was a dead project that I really like and so had to revive anyway. And I used Claude to work on it as I'm not a mobile dev; been planning to republish but haven't gotten around to it. I won't bother to check my laptop but there's even more there.
Now imagine if I (and others interested in those projects) could contribute to small funding pools for various projects of interest, with the assurance that said funds go to that feature/fix which is of interest or gets refunded. I think that'd result in the general OSS support needle being pushed that much further over time.
If all you’ve got is relative pocket change they probably aren’t going to agree but if you put real money behind it and it doesn’t go against their vision of the project then most people would be willing to accept actual contracting work to expand their project.
This kind of makes sense in that space while the subsidies (if true) last?
Unrelated, "tokens" feels very like... back-then blockchain to me. All the craze.
It’s just an obvious example of market segmentation by charging enterprise customers many times more than personal users while selling the same product