We'll be out of work whilst bailing out these companies with printed money and another round of inflation. The middle class will cease to exist. But hey the stock market will show higher numbers so its all good.
As a serious professional in the industry - we're dinosaurs. Nobody cares anymore.
The kids are running the show and are making billions with stuff that doesn't work. But it makes money so nobody cares.
This is not a new phenomenon, it started years ago and really took off when JS became the new hotness. You could see it happening live, right here on HN. But the blast radius is massively increased now with AI and people are getting hurt. It's not funny.
The ship has sailed on rigor.
The sad thing is that this is not going to get better. The best we can hope for is slight improvements to agentic "engineering" practice with lots and lots of blog posts on HN written about how they are rediscovering basic engineering practices.
We (the dinosaurs) will roll our eyes while making a fraction of the money the kids are making.
And even if the whole AI ecosystem implodes (it won't) that would be a massive recession and certainly wouldn't make the remaining software engineering work more rigorous either.
As the Simpsons put it: "An I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong."
I'm not even necessarily describing myself as a serious professional - in many ways I'm adjacent to all this! But there's a contingent of people (and in real life, too, not just on HN) who get very angry at the very concept of professionalism itself.
>Once approved, our new bonus program will give every team member who isn’t on an incentive compensation plan or bonus plan today, the opportunity to earn a cash bonus based on their individual performance, targeting 10% of salary, awarded at their manager’s discretion.
LOL. So basically buckle up and do what you're told and grind. And hope your manager likes you or you'll get nothing.
These people want to play god with our lives but at the same time move fast and break things. Look at software quality anywhere, it's a mess and only about to get much worse.
We should not let them. Jail time for anyone involved in any of the decision making process, applied at scale with the number of vehicles and deaths.
Why should the standards be any different? They want to change the status quo with tech only so they can get paid and extort us with yet more subscriptions.
AVs will never substantially reduce road deaths. They will optimize to just being slightly better than human, but fail in new and more unexpected ways. There is not enough incentive for them to make it safer.
>a project manager vibe-coded the change without thinking it through at all
The PMs vibe-coding and having no idea what they're doing isn't even the main issue (although it is pretty bad).
The main issue is: how are the actual engineers supposed to "review" the slop? They probably report to the same PM or are at below in the org chart and might be evaluated by them. Not just at MS, but any company.
Such a conflict of interest would be detrimental to quality anywhere. You wouldn't build a bridge like this, nor should you software.
If openai / anthropic / google were the only game in town then yea, we’d already be paying 5x as much as we do. But local models are so close to sota that it just isn’t going to happen. If I’m a lawyer getting billed $500k/yr on $600k profit I’d rather buy a chonky server and run a model that’s 90% as good and get my money back in 2 years, then pay $5k electricity on $600k profit.
Nobody will successfully lobby for banning local models either, it just isn’t going to happen when the rest of the world will happily avoid paying 80% of their profits to some US bigco for the privilege of existing.
The question is how much friction there will be for people to switch over to Gemini, GPT or maybe even DeepSeek or Mistral or whatever. Even if price hikes are inevitable across the board, the moat any single org has is somewhat limited, so prices definitely will be a factor they'll compete on with one another at least a bit.
I disagree. The models are going to become commodities (we're already almost there), but the tooling and integrations will be the moat. Reproducing everything Anthropic has already built with Claude Code, Cowork, and all their connectors would be nontrivial, and they're just getting started.
Anyone can implement an AI chatbot. But few will be able to provide AI that's deeply integrated into our daily lives.
How would it be nontrivial? Assuming the AI can replace a programmer "reproduce app/api/ecosystem Y" is just tokens. And a negligible amount for trillion dollar companies that have their own data centers.
> Reproducing everything Anthropic has already built with Claude Code, Cowork, and all their connectors would be nontrivial, and they're just getting started.
They're one org with presumably some specific direction. As the actual models get better, expect a large part of the dev community iterating on tools way more easily, sometimes ones that Anthropic doesn't quite have an equivalent to - for example, just recently Cline released their Kanban solution to dish out tasks to agents (https://cline.bot/kanban), OpenCode has been around for a while for the agentic stuff (https://opencode.ai/) and now has a desktop and web version as well, alongside dozens of others. Cline and KiloCode also have decent browser automation.
I will admit that everyone working on everything at the same time definitely means limitless reinvention of the wheel and some genuinely good initiatives dying off along the way (I personally liked RooCode more than both the Cline and KiloCode for Visual Studio Code, sad to see them go), but I doubt we're gonna see a lack of software. Maybe a lack of good software, though; not like Anthropic or any org has any moat there either, since they're under the additional pressure of having to do a shitload of PR and release new models and keep up appearances, compared to your average dev just pushing to GitHub (unless they want corporate money, in which case they do need some polish).
Didn’t Anthropic vibe code all of those integrations? If AI coding is as useful and successful as it is touted, then those integration should be no moat at all.
> I predict that costs will grow to 80% of what it would cost a human, across the board for everything AI can do.
80% of a human's price varies greatly by region. 80% of the lowest-priced effort-of- humans in this space right now will probably not be sustainable for the sellers.
This is assuming there will be no competition. But why wouldn't there be? Especially since you can use open source models, which are not too far from frontier models (from now).
Kimi and GLM 5.1 are already capable of handling a good chunk of my tasks. They about to lose the leverage to allow them to drastically increase prices - enough models are 6-12 months away from being good enough large proportions of their customers uses.
I don't think costs will grow on either side in the long term. In the short term, yes, but once they get the infrastructure in place to support AI, costs will go down. Right now, they're on borrowed infra.
Article relies on a study published in Jan 2024 and a single sentence quote from an Nvidia exec, which sounds like it might have just a little bit been taken out of context.
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