199 karma · joined October 10, 2019
Coding has already gone this way and plenty of people do find motivation and glory in the final product vs. the building of the product (myself included). I absolutely see value in a person being able to humanize llm math output and see the field moving in that direction.
Enterprise is how Claude/OAI make their money. Enterprise companies absolutely optimize around costs for infra, it's like an entire job category.
> Also the actual LLM is a tiny portion of the value added. Anyone that tried to build agentic solutions from LLM apis quickly realizes that a huge value is the Claude Code / Codex harness. There are open source implementations like OpenCode but they're not nearly as good.
Claude and OAI are not valued at $1T because of their harnesses
> Think about it another way. Consider how much money Microsoft spends on maintaining Excel. There are open source alternatives that have >90% of the functionality, they'll even work w/ Excel files and generate them. Google sheets is probably 99% and available to everyone and better in a lot of regards. But the immense value spreadsheet software produces workers above the $100 or whatever a year makes it so that there is a real moat and no one bothers exploring alternatives.
Enterprise excel is like $50 a month, the closed source labs charge orders of magnitude more than that per user per month for enterprise, and want to charge more if they can to maintain their valuation. I spent $20 in an afternoon yesterday using my work plan for one workflow for reference, I probably spend at least $50 a day and I don't even do that much coding anymore.
Ironically this was advice Ralph Waldo Emerson gave in 1840 so by your logic it's irrelevant just because it's old.