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Comment by anilgulecha | Hacker News Reader

IMO, I read 2 faulty assumptions:

1) That LLM/Agents are being pushed and not adopted. I see plenty of deep adoption by junior folks.

2) The unit economics don't work out. From the details on every model so far - each model is wildly profitable over it's amotized time-frame. It's just that money is used upfront for the next model, and each next model is significantly more costly to train. The best case argument instead is - this will not last and we'll pour more on some models, than see in it's revenue.

I think realistically these form the core of the thesis, and IMO, and hence it's conclusions are a bit off the mark.

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Juniors reverting to something even less useful is not a selling point. Often most adoption is forced by bosses. Repo code change metrics tell you all you need to know how well it 'works'.

The economics do not work, not even close. Even if they ever did (probably a decade or so after the bubble pops), all parts of the stack(with the expetion of nvidia, maybe) are interchangeable. Meaning that people can easliy swap out foundation models, nor are creating new wrappers very hard. It will be a race to the bottom, I doubt anyone will make much money.

Last I checked, ycombinator will not fund your start-up if you shill for AI hard enough.

1) there is more to the world than software development

2) there is no profit. There is barely any revenue, the only money is continuous injections of VC cash and some frankly Enron-like book keeping.

apparently their goal is to take part of the 60 trillion dollar labor market that includes fast food order takers, IT professionals, hotel front desk workers, etc. There is plenty of payroll they can target

> I see plenty of deep adoption by junior folks

Where mate? Details?

> From the details on every model so far - each model is wildly profitable over it's amotized time-frame

Is it? Is that why all of them are switching their users from the subsidized flat-rates to billing based on usage?

> hence it's conclusions are a bit off the mark

You're funny - they are spot on and any dreamer who is working for equity in these LLM-wrapper-product companies who dreams of getting rich in the next few years or so, is in for a nasty surprise.

The younger devs have largely been the ones showing us old farts (eg millennials) how do to the really sophisticated stuff with claude - custom skills, plugins, tooling like openspec, things that have had massive benefits over stock claude.

We are nowhere near the ceiling in terms of process either.

Re: flat rate going to by-usage, I believe this is largely a long tail problem. You have a small number of power users that capitalize on the flat rate to use the service orders of magnitude more than the average user.

> really sophisticated stuff with claude - custom skills, plugins, tooling

You mean the "make-no-mistakes.md" and linter pipeline? Did not know that was now considered top-notch stuff.

Iceberg surface

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