1. Development is now so cheap! Pay us the tokens!

2. Development now creates unreliable code at incredible speed! Pay is more tokens!

3. You can’t reliably verify any code before prod, pay us all the tokens so we can do it for you, possibly also unreliable!

It used to be that when you pay for something you expect some level of quality, not the appearance of it.

The mental acrobatics today are simply because engineers have become expensive. But engineers didn’t make themselves expensive, tech companies created this culture in order to monopolize talent, and this caused inflation, which leaked into the cost of living for these centers of gravity, which resulted in even more wage inflation, perks, etc.

They can’t solve this problem now, are blaming it on engineers, the government, w/e.

The solution seems to be, clone cheap engineers. They will improve later. I don’t have a problem with this, a valid idea is a valid idea.

However, extrapolating to the logical conclusion, It will be quite interesting when companies realize the trap. Vendors will jack up prices so much that companies will scramble for engineers, which by then will have moved on to other careers because jobs dried out.

At this time, LLM vendors will be offering refactoring solutions. For $1M, we will rebuild all your apps behavior from scratch.

Then they will tell companies to give up code altogether. They will sell AI as a service where you give it an idea, the ai builds it internally, you don’t get to see it bc it’s not your IP anymore. You only get to validate behavior.

Then, the next step will be for the AI companies to cut the middleman (the client companies) and go directly to their customer base because they understand what they need better than anyone, that an app is unnecessary. No UI is needed, you talk to your AI companion and things magically get done.

No one will know what a spreadsheet is anymore, some will forget how to use a keyboard, and at this point some laws will have been sleepwalked into maintaining this status quo in perpetuity.

It’s very easy to convince an addict to buy more drugs.