Oh but why do they need a high salary when AI gives us free software? /s
974 karma · joined April 26, 2026
Example? "Massive" is relative, and it's almost never actually massive to the person paying. Software is incredibly cheap.
Adobe is primarily a professional program and even at higher fees it's a miniscule amount compared to the rate of the professional using it. Adobe isn't scooping up 20% of their earnings, it's more on the order of 0.07%.
The entities seemingly paying "massive tolls" are large corporations, who pay the big bucks because they're paying per seat, employing tens or hundreds of thousands of people. The toll per-person is, again, absolutely tiny and nothing compared to the salaries paid.
So in exchange for devaluing the labor of anyone in the firing lines of AI, removing a path to building a business with time, smarts and energy instead of capital, not actually fixing the lower and middle classes main categories of expenses (food,housing,healthcare) where is it going to make everyone better off?
I feel like anyone optimistic about these changes hasn't actually thought it through..
To adjust the metaphor a bit.. the cows have revolted and we can no longer get any steak.
If writing code via AI is an order of magnitude faster there won't be companies hiring people who want to code by hand. If you try to start a company by doing so then you'll lose to competitors without that restriction.
The choices left are: be homeless, change careers completely or suck it up and do something you don't like after being career-catfished
When you think through the 'change careers' path it also sucks and might not even be viable for many
I'm lucky I like coding with AI.. but I have worked jobs I hate and it's hell, and there's no amount of processing it that'll fix it except getting out of the situation
When 20% of your waking hours are free, and 10% of your mental energy.. it's pretty hard to argue that work isn't your life.
No amount of processing will move someone from ordering a steak to just enjoying their given peanut butter sandwich instead. They ordered the steak, and now the restaurant is telling us all too bad there's no steak anymore - eat your damn sandwich.
To better predict what they'll do with it we'd need to know the proportion of token usage via API vs subscription. Keeping an affordable, slightly unprofitable subscription to get people in isn't a bad idea. They also get marketing benefits from the word of mouth
If you have a large human-written system with a little thought put into it you should be able to find the specific pieces that handle the behavior you want and work on that, and if it's good then changing it should have a small blast radius and be covered with regression tests
In contrast, I've fully vibe coded a 15k line tool for myself with Opus and I have no idea how on earth it's architected after reading through it. It has "tests" but I don't trust them. It's just all over the place with no coherent design to it. It works, but it's making me more and more nervous to change it
They've built an entire strategy around moving slow and doing it better
There are 1000 variables that go into it
Code quality matters to AI just as much as it did to people
uh.. zoom out a bit? The stock price is double what it was two years ago
We're automating high paying careers and making what, the consumer's todo list and budgeting apps cheaper for them? My expensive smartphone is going to cost me ~$10/mo over its lifespan. I don't care if most of these consumer products get cheaper when they're a tiny portion of my spending
For you, maybe. You can't assume that applies to everyone.
It's a very extreme form of individualism in combination with capitalism. Then we have the worship of corporations
The best way to operate under that is how you should expect everyone else to: strongly advocate for yourself, because even hospitals in cases like this will be looking after themselves first
No-one's going to want to talk to a 7B model for more than 3 minutes
> Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt.
No, they can't, at least not any semblance of quality. The cases we're seeing where this does kinda work is in ports and translation where all the rules are already documented in the best specification language possible with a way for the LLM to verify itself: code. We saw this close to a year ago now with Cloudflare and NextJS
> The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about
These are operating on different capabilities - AI's ability to answer informational queries as a chatbot frankly sucks and can't be trusted without verifying it. I run up against this every day. A problem with a verifiable answer on the other hand it's very good at solving. He knows this (his next paragraph) but he's putting them on the same scale of "stressing the system" to attempt to add proof to his introductory claim
And then there's the completely unverifiable scare that there are internal frontier models way beyond anything we've seen "swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics"
I dunno. I haven't been able to set up OpenAIs remote codex connection, their shit is buggy as hell and the web UI keeps crashing and making messages disappear. Is this what their internal superhuman "Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work" looks like? Granted Claude has been really smooth, but still..