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Comment by Culonavirus | Hacker News Reader

Plenty of people will be coding by hand for years to come. They just wont be employed for doing so.

Divide the amount of revenue from the big AI companies by the total number of developers worldwide and you'll see that most are still mostly hand-coding despite what the megaphones on the internet say.

The overwhelming majority AI spend is being done by startups funded by venture capital.

Meanwhile, big companies have massively cut/capped AI spending at the exact time these companies need to triple prices to get any margins at all.

Perhaps dead internet theory applies more than normal to programming forums.

basically every single point here is wrong and most are easily refuted by looking at anthropic's s1

Anthropic's S1?

$16B revenue in first half means $32B for the whole year at that ARR. Divided into 47.2M devs gives us $677/yr per dev assuming that ZERO non-devs ever pay for Anthropic. Add in all the OpenAI and Chinese spend and spread them among developers only and the average is still only around $1k/yr/dev.

Top 1% of AI users spend $9,567.53/mo or $114810.36/yr while median spends $15.70 or $188.40/yr. 80% of the top 1% of AI users are backed by venture capital.

https://ramp.com/data/ai-index#adoption#overall

Anthropic + OpenAI seem to have in the area of 70-100M users.

Only problem is that 1e6*114,810.36 ~= $114.8B which exceeds stated income of OpenAI, Anthropic, and all the Chinese firms combined.

When you crunch those top 1% guys, you get a number more like just 250-500k or so accounting for almost all current AI spend which leaves 46.5-47M devs using very little AI. You can adjust these numbers by massive margins (around an order of magnitude) and still see that the math doesn't work out like you seem to think.

When all that venture capital/private equity gets crunched, those companies won't be able to afford to keep blowing a hundred thousand per dev. When they back off, AI sales will drop further lowering available venture capital risking a massive downward spiral.

At least in my organization we simply use the cheapest models. It's possible for a developer to do most of their coding with something like GPT6-Luna for less than 100$ a month with current prices.

I don't know anyone dev spending even 500$ a month on AI, but nearly everyone does use it to write code. And I work a broke public sector organization, not some fancy startup or big tech.

It's a mixed bag. The company I work for (nearly $6 billion anual revenue, southern EU) only started giving out the lowest tier of Github Copilot licenses this summer, and only widely at the business units they're desperate to see grow (I got lucky there due to wearing multiple hats). Everyone else keeps coding manually, although the nerdiest of us catch up with Codex/Claude/whatever on our own time, same as it ever was.

Meanwhile, a friend at a consulting company of similar scale tells me they don't hire anyone who shows a lack of experience with "agentic engineering" during the interview. They're turning all their projects into software factories from issue ticket to deployment. He's much more resourceful and experienced than me so I trust he isn't automating himself out of his own job, but I'm much more gloomy about this transition.

> Everyone else keeps coding manually, although the nerdiest of us catch up with Codex/Claude/whatever on our own time, same as it ever was.

Technologists uncritically doing the bidding of Silicon Valley billionaires. Same as it ever was. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50274456

I agree in principle, but I don't feel in a position to bargain: I'm a junior dev earning below my region's average salary (for all industries, not just tech), far below other engineers my age because reasons, and my education is now becoming obsolete for industry. I'll let others take the high ground, I just want to stay employable and not lock myself out of a decent salary.

Seriously, we’re in a bubble here and everything thinks everything is touched by ai now. That’s not true at all, people need to look outside of HN and Twitter. Lots of devs are refusing to use them. Quite a number of companies are happily chugging away by hand.

They will slowly get eaten by more dynamic competition.

Since when do more dynamic companies win?

Microsoft is doing fine.

I don't think we're talking about Microsoft here.

I highly doubt that most code by hand. I work for a big, boring public sector organization that is pretty broke, and even we've had Copilot licenses for a long time. We just use the cheapest models to keep the bill in check.

Thank the gods, nobody's forcing me to be employed.

And why hire someone who writes instructions for the agent? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYG1TAzexdo

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