Jess👾I don't think AI will ever be "gone". We can't put the slop genie back in the bottle. But what WILL happen, it Has to happen, is that the costs per token will skyrocket as the free money runs out. There's just no other economics way for this to happen. And then all the slop engineers are going to discover: they don't know how to code without burning a million tokens a day, and all those tokens are costing more than double their salaries. So employers are going to discover: we can just hire 3 people for the price of one slop engineer and all their tokens.
If your $100k engineer is burning $200k in tokens every year, are they actually doing more and better and faster than simply having 3 $100k engineers? Probably not. But maybe they'll say it's worth having 2 engineers with a $50k slop budget each just so they see the barrel of the gun in case they decide to try and unionize.
🏳️🌈 Bri 🌞🚴🌱✨@JessTheUnstill Since you mention Uber... There's the possibility for a world where they keep the Claude Code sub and hire developers freelance through an app to fix the code it spits out.
I genuinely expect developers would work fast food before doing that, though.
@cargot_robbie Oh, people will do a lot in order to avoid being on the streets. But the problem lies in the fact that it's not as simple as hiring freelancers to fix slop. Any developer can tell you: maintaining legacy code is far more challenging than writing new code. And when the code you're trying to maintain is slop, it's just that much more difficult. And if it's short timers like freelancers who don't have the time to actually roll up sleeves and wrap their heads around the codebase, it'd be nearly impossible.
@JessTheUnstill I hope you're right. I expect you're right, really, because I know you're right about maintaining legacy code. The cynicism in me has trouble accepting that tech companies won't find a way to structure developing as a gig, too, but I certainly don't know how they would do it.
The liabilities they could have developers own are the code itself, or the hardware. They won't give up the former, and they won't accept the latter (WFH).
@cargot_robbie It's the same pressures that corps have always faced - in-house vs offshore vs outsource vs contractors vs freelance. AI doesn't fundamentally change that balancing act. Corps will keep trying to go cheap, some may learn their lessons, others will keep going cheap until the tech debt becomes so unsustainable they are forced to do something different.
@JessTheUnstill True enough, the more things change the more they stay the same. I think if the expectation CTOs have is that AI will produce most of the code and developers will be much cheaper, they'll be mistaken. I hope so, at least.
Ed Wiebe
TheStrangelet 
@JessTheUnstill Exactly, the costs don't make sense once the VC cash and subsidies dry up, and they will.
rgegriff (On a new server)@JessTheUnstill I saw someone who was saying that instead of using AI to automate tasks, they use AI to write scripts to automate tasks and... my colleague that is just devops with extra steps
Daniël Franke 
@JessTheUnstill That is my prediction as well. The slop mongers and their backers are hoping we’ll be too dependent on them before this happens, inspired by ethical companies like uber.
P@JessTheUnstill What do you think about the potential for smaller, powerful models in the future (like another deepseek moment)?
@leuven I don't know enough about the AI tech in specific to say, tbh. Maybe exponential improvements will be invented. But either way, we have all these tech giants now saddled with trillions in debt and stockholder expectations and GPUs and data centers. Something has gotta give.
Tiota Sram@JessTheUnstill @leuven I wrote a bit about the underlying economic problem that persists even if prices don't go up:
https://cs.wellesley.edu/~pmwh/advice/aiProductivity.html
TL;DR: the more effective you are at using "AI" to "increase productivity" the more likely you are to get fired and replaced by "AI."
May Likes Toronto@JessTheUnstill If prices don't go up by 2 orders of magnitude, I'll be shocked.
kit@JessTheUnstill
In the meanwhile the layoffs depress the market, so they'll be able to get their three humans for old price of one.
The purpose of the system is what it does.
Joscelyn Transpiring@JessTheUnstill I do gotta think the economics of this can’t go on that much longer. You can’t just keep burning billions in cash in a way where each use of your service costs you money rather than makes you money, and there’s no pathway to making it profitable other than raising the fee to use it. Or at least in a rational economy I would think that. Sometimes I wonder now
i like skunks@JessTheUnstill
I wish I knew a way to get out of tech
I wish I knew a way to get out of tech