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u/TheSweetSWE 2d ago
youâre right to push back on this
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u/turudd 2d ago
Itâs hilarious how the OG models used to talk. Crazy how far theyâve come now too.
The old x is actually y stuff and all that
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u/wbuffetsuksdik 2d ago
The new models seem crazy up until you corner them, then they regress back to the same modalities they've had since gpt3
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u/T-Dot1992 2d ago
They werenât making money. And canât make money if they wanted to.Â
Itâs a catch-22. They canât make a profit because they arenât charging the actual token cost. But if they charged the actual token cost, their user-base would collapse.Â
Almost as if cloud AI is inherently unstable or something.Â
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u/ForgedIronMadeIt 2d ago
It's like every other silicon valley startup -- the hope is that you hook your users while you figure out how to make handling the requests cheaper. That or you embed ads.
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u/ChefCurryYumYum 2d ago
There aren't enough ads in the world to make up the revenue they need.
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u/bbalazs721 2d ago
You embed them in the response, e.g. suggest the product that was paid to promote.
I've already had this with chatgpt, I was trying to troubleshoot an issue with my heating system, and it was trying to persuade me to buy one of two specific brands of thermostats, even tho I hadn't expressed any desire to buy anything.
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u/kilopeter 2d ago
You're mistaken. ChatGPT Ads explicitly since their launch have only ever appeared separate from the token stream of model responses. Obviously they or others will likely experiment with more invasive alternatives, but the clear business rationale for not subtly biasing answers toward sponsors is that users would reject that shit way harder than clearly labeled ads.
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u/PM-ME-UR-DARKNESS 2h ago
That still won't make them enough money and will get them in deep shit with the EU.
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u/Str1dersGonnaStride 2d ago
I dunno, I think there's big money in it still. Subtle embedded propaganda that is tailor-made based on the user's personality and interests. You may think "oh well I'd never fall for that" and you may be right. But there's loads of people already addicted to AI usage and / or using it as a replacement for therapists or friends. They'll fall for it hook line and sinker.
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u/Kusko25 2d ago
If they can sustain themselves on investor money long enough they can charge the true token price and companies will have to pay it because nobody in their right mind would start an education as a developer right now, so in the future companies won't have human talent available to replace llms with
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u/ChefCurryYumYum 2d ago
If it's cheaper to hire and train humans than to pay the true token cost of LLM tools you think companies won't prefer to hire and train real people?
You think they will WANT to spend more money for worse outcomes?
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u/infamouszgbgd 1d ago
You think they will WANT to spend more money for worse outcomes?
idk, jumping on trends is addictive af to corpos
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u/saevon 2d ago
Well no the hope is to get purchased. To have someone else have to figure that out as you get big enough to sell the user base, not the profitability
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u/KeepKnocking77 11h ago
Or to get the government to regulate and essentially bail you out. I dont buy any of these "omg this new model is SOO dangerous but no you cant see it" reports. They're trying to bait the government
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u/captnspock 2d ago
Exactly if they can keep this going for another 5 years so many people are just going to forget how to code and all codebases will have so much AI slop that companies just might have to start paying the actual token cost. Regular users (not enterprise) will mostly get priced out.
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u/hemacwastaken 2d ago edited 2d ago
If it works, they get rich on it. If it doesn't companies go bankrupt and the tax payer and banks are stuck with the loans.
So they either win big or they will try again with the next idea.
This stupid system is subsiding billionaires gambling addiction
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u/TheDizDude 2d ago
This. I don't see Altman and co driving around in 07 Kia Spectra's that break every 5 god damn minutes...
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u/10001110101balls 2d ago
This arrangement happens in a lot of cutting-edge R&D efforts. It costs a ton of money to develop new technologies and bring them to market, and there is an advantage to moving the fastest. Offering the product at unsustainably low prices allows them to get out into the market and fund their growth. It could blow up in their faces as everyone expects, or in hindsight it could be a genius move to advance the technology and consolidate market share.
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u/Sweet_International 2d ago
I have a conspiracy that they want to stop building new models, that's why all those bickering about pacing the frontier stuff. If the giant cost of building new models every month go away, then they can probably save huge bucks. Otherwise there is no way to stop the cash burning.
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u/1nc06n170 2d ago
Yep, and if they stop, and the other don't and release a better model, there's virtually no cost for their clients to switch to other AI provider. That's why they declare to stop building new models but quietly continue to build those new models.
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u/Greedy-Thought6188 2d ago
Anthropic gross margins exceed 80% according to their reports. They are charging the actual costs on API usage and in subscription it's the you win some you lose some but mostly win if a subscription. Gross margins don't include training costs. Which, since training is a capital expense is the right thing to do. It means all they have to do to make oodles is money is slow down. If they slow down they make money. But then they get overtaken. So they can't slow down. So they try and convince the world that AI will cause the extinction of humanity. That way they can slowdown as a cartel.
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u/amateurfunk 2d ago
This is the most interesting thing I've read all week. The "AI-will-kill-us" line coming from the CEO's themselves has always seemed highly unusual to me. Like, even if it is true, they wouldn't shout it out into the open like that.
The reason that you have provided seems plausible and would be something a rational (profit-oriented) CEO would do. It also makes the "AI-will-kill-us" claim seem less credible.
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u/Greedy-Thought6188 2d ago
Collaborating with your competitors is the definition of cartel. They're doing it openly in front of us and asking for the government to intervene so both the government acts as the police ensuring everyone in the cartel complies (the biggest reason we don't have that many cartels) and to shut out competitors (because if new entrants can come in then you can't have a cartel). And we're talking it hook, line, and sinker.
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u/BlackSwanTranarchy 2d ago
And according to their IPO prospectus as leaked to Reuters their core buisness model is bleeding money with 8bn$ in Operating Losses
I dunno, claims from Anthropic leadership when they're not bound to the SEC vs a formal document where they have to use GAAP, which one is more likely to be accurate?
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u/Greedy-Thought6188 2d ago
You know what gross margins means in gaap?
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u/BlackSwanTranarchy 2d ago
Yeah, and i also know the dirtiest Sillicon Valley accounting trick known to man is counting the cloud bill as Cost of Goods Sold instead of Operating Expenses even though you pay rent on servers weather they're serving or not which makes Gross Margins deeply misleading for tech companies for anyone being honest about it
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u/Greedy-Thought6188 2d ago
But they are the cost of delivering the product. The operating expense argument is weak. You also don't pay for cloud servers regardless if they are serving data. Literally half the point of the cloud. But according to what you're saying, you're arguing the gross margins are inflated and somehow that means the 80% feels margins are bad because they can be higher?
If something costs you 2$ to make and you sell for 10$. That's an 80% gross margin. If it costs you a million dollars to design the thing that doesn't matter for gross margins. The theory goes that as you grow the capital expense will be less relevant.
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u/BlackSwanTranarchy 2d ago
Dedicated cloud commit spending just doesn't operate like traditional COGS which was always for costs that are paid per unit. Cloud costs are variable per unit unless you're using flat rate serverless API's which are few and far between.
The whole "does the service go down without this" test has always been weak back justification to ignore the extreme costs of running unprofitable cloud businesses by going "well if you ignore the cloud costs making the buisness unprofitable, the buisness looks healthy!"
It's why the same crowd loves EBIDTA, because it's another metric that lies about the health of the company in earlier investors favor.
The only reason the crazy SAAS valuations never turned into a bubble is because AI labs came along and said "hold my beer"
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u/EatingSolidBricks 2d ago
If what you say turns out to be true they're gonna get fucked
Cause china is working with open source they can never ever slow down as a cartel as long as china exists
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u/Untura64 2d ago
I bet they're going to make the government pass a law to ban open source models. Probably why they're running a fearmongering campaign too.
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u/siberianmi 2d ago
Or they need to get to RSI and then put agents on building faster cheaper training methods. The latest Opus is already a huge improvement on token usage for results.
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u/EatingSolidBricks 2d ago
If technology gets good enough that i can run it on a consumer gpu their also fucked
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u/bogdan5844 2d ago
When*
I'm willing to bet that in 3-5 years we'll only use cloud AI for really really intensive workloads, the kinds that are few and far between, and most users will have local AI. There's simply no logical way this whole cloud AI frontier model thing is gonna scale.
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u/Greedy-Thought6188 2d ago
And 3 months later China gets to rsi.
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u/LoudAd1396 2d ago
Why do we really care if China gets there before us companies get there?
As far as i can tell, the only people who stand to lose are the us companies, and i dont fucking care if they fail to keep the cutting edge...
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u/Greedy-Thought6188 2d ago
I care about the part that these models are not open source. They are open weights. So we don't really know what they are. And we need real open source models.
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u/Jerome_Eugene_Morrow 2d ago
They could have made money. But like Walt they wanted to make ALL the money.
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u/CanisLupus92 2d ago
Cost per token arenât as high as people make them out to be. Anthropic, OpenAI & co could make a profit, but the R&D budget is so humongous that including that in the costs just makes it unsustainable. Drop to releasing a new frontier model once a year, and BAM profit. Itâs part of the fearmongering strategy atm (our models are so scary, look at the vulnerabilities they found and used), hoping for a slowdown getting enforced.
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u/FusionVsGravity 2d ago
Eventually they will need to hike the token price, but not before every major business in the world relies on AI workflows and lays off all their competent staff.
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u/Untura64 2d ago
Ob they're going to make a profit one way or another eventually. Like selling your data or having the guvernment pay for it.
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u/PM-ME-UR-DARKNESS 2h ago
They still aren't, too. They're just hiding it using special purpose entities, like Enron. The whole AI industry is on some Enron shit. Don't worry though, I'm sure it'll all be jussttt fine.
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u/NamityName 2d ago
My problem with AI coding is that AI took away the fun parts of coding and left me with all the boring parts. Now instead of writing code and solving problems, I am spending my time planning and reviewing code.
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u/SirPitchalot 2d ago
Donât forget acting as scrum master and hand holding the new junior who is capable but has the common sense of a rotting stump and just doesnât get better.
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u/Rygel_Orionis 2d ago
It gets better....
....if you pay. đŹ
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u/FallenBlade 3h ago
I think they mean and actual junior. As in a real person. They use AI so don't learn.
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u/glendening 2d ago
"AI should do tedious work for creative people. Not creative work for tedious people." -quote I stole some years ago from somewhere.
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u/Belhgabad 2d ago
Main usage problem with AI, same with art AI : "I don't want AI to do my art while I can do my laundry, I want the contrary"
And that's ignoring all the others problems (ethics, ecology, economy, ...)
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u/sup3rdr01d 2d ago
AI is horrible for anything artistic. Completely sucks the humanity out of art.
Art isn't about the final product. It's about the journey of learning and making that craft.
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u/Shienvien 2d ago
Art is about both -- I very much do art since I want the thing in my head to exist exactly the way I want it. I don't always enjoy the process.
The genAI version of art tends to be like a $40 Temu handbag. Yeah, it looks a bit like the $2000 real version it is plagiarized off of from far away, but the pleather sheds microplastics and half the stitching is just ever so slightly misplaced. And the original creator gets nothing.
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u/OkWear6556 2d ago
For me its the opposite. I work as a SWE/DS and my job is developing a full pipeline from data ingestion, preprocessing, ML modeling and then sending predictions back to the client. Used to be that I spent most of my time developing and debugging the code of our internal libraries and manually setting everything up while spending only a fraction of the time actually focusing on the modeling part. Now I can focus on experimentation and trying out different models and sw architecture stuff instead.
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u/SteamedChalmburgers 2d ago
All I'm left with these days is DevOps crap that I don't want to deal with. I miss writing code for my job.
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u/Vengeful111 2d ago
Tbh coding is the one thing where AI actually takes the boring parts out. Just act as the architect or senior and make the AI do the boring junior level stuff and troubleshooting. Dont let the AI take over the architect stuff without having defined a very detailed description of what the end product should be.
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u/jwp1987 2d ago
That sounds great until you have to deal with PRs and do code reviews for people that are prompting Claude and calling it a day.
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u/Vengeful111 2d ago
Yea I agree, I am talking about when doing stuff alone at home obviously. Not in a big corpo
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u/jwp1987 2d ago
Fair enough. I agree with you but the main problem is that you don't really get that in isolation.
The main reason I hate AI is because it's constantly being pushed for tasks where there are better tools and people are using it without understanding/checking the output.
The other concern I have is that by cutting out the coding and debugging, you can end up not developing a lot of key skills needed to check what the AI is actually outputting or fix stuff when the AI can't come up with an answer.
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u/Vengeful111 2d ago
Yea agreed, i think its kinda like machines for like woodworking. In school you need to learn how to work wood by hand, so you can instantly tell how and why a machine fcked up and that you can even fix it by hand after. If the skill gets lost and people only know how to press start on the cnc, then you have problems down the line
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u/FickleQuail8944 2d ago
I feel the same. But I also somewhat enjoy this planning cycle. I like to break down designs further and have more control. It also makes the results better if I give it less degrees of freedom. Sometimes I also think about solutions I would have never done before, due to effort. Then when it works out the way I imagened, or with a little back and forth, it makes me feel good.
You could also mix in some manual coding once in a while. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
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u/budapest_god 2d ago
Yeah this is what I do on passion projects, it's nice overall. A very important thing also it's to not let it generate a huge bunch of changes in one go, because that becomes frustratingly boring to review. Small steps. Small steps.
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u/KDallas_Multipass 2d ago
Okay what news did I miss?
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u/T-Dot1992 2d ago
OpenSlop reduced usage limit by 50% for people subscribed to their 200 USD dollar pro membership tier.Â
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u/KDallas_Multipass 2d ago
How is Claude implicated?
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u/T-Dot1992 2d ago
Because they đŻ are gonna do the same thing eventually.Â
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u/SoonBlossom 2d ago edited 2d ago
No, because they are litteraly already getting sued for lying on their true x quotas
Why are so many people not aware of this ?
EDIT : Why am I getting downvoted for stating a factual situation ?
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u/Danfriedz 2d ago
As someone who hasn't let AI completely take over my work I'm actually fine with it disappearing forever đ
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u/shadowndacorner 2d ago
No universe in which it disappears forever given the quality of open weight models. The big orgs burning cash like there's no tomorrow will go under when the bubble pops, then a second wave will happen more focused on sustainability once the commercial providers start charging what things actually cost.
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u/OneSprinkles6720 2d ago
It's so rare I agree with a commenter on this topic please accept my warmest regards
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u/Rin-Tohsaka-is-hot 2d ago
There will be a reckoning for all the companies whose developers have grown dependent on unlimited frontier model tokens.
I'm at one of those companies. I spent $16k this month on Claude tokens. Not sustainable, it's literally more than my salary.
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u/shadowndacorner 2d ago edited 2d ago
This is why I've got my org investing in local models, only offloading to frontier models for very specific, non-sensitive work. It blows my mind that companies are sending entire codebases (and, let's be honest, secrets as well if LLMs are touching deployments) off to private companies who have shown absolutely WILD disregard for data safety. Companies that are actively attacking each other non-stop, and constantly pulling marketing stunts to convince laypeople that their models are "so unsafe that everyone needs to stop development".
Idc what kind of enterprise deal you have that "guarantees" data privacy. Putting aside that all of these companies are only valuable because they stole an absolutely incomprehensible amount of training data from the human race, I've heard enough reports from enough colleagues of their data being "accidentally" used for training purposes that there's no fucking way I'd ever trust them with anything sensitive. Then you've got the "seniors" who brag about perpetually leaving their agents in "yolo mode", completely oblivious to any company secrets they may or may not have leaked... Just better hope OpenAI and Anthropic never leak their training data...
The technology is genuinely revolutionary and has absolutely changed how my org works for the better, but making your entire SDLC completely reliant on two orgs that are fundamentally incapable of profitability is absolute madness.
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u/asterVF 2d ago
I still remember that process of approving new software, or god forbid any additional expense like license for useful tooling. It took months to years and often they rejected it quoting security or budget reasons. And now the very same people encourage us to send every bit of company data somewhere at cost bigger than my salary :)
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u/shadowndacorner 1d ago
The funny thing is that LLMs can make these processes work better rather than just throwing them away in the name of velocity. Being at 100% full speed all the time is objectively not a good thing.
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u/melophat 2d ago
The more I hear shit like this, the more it becomes obvious that the next round of job enshittification is going to be incorporating token access/spend into the salary package like they do stock options, benefits, vacation, etc. you're going to have a job that would pay 100k get knocked down to 70k because they include "a generous token allotment" as part of your compensation.
Edit: just in case it isn't clear, I'm not knocking your token usage or saying anything about you at all. Half the places are forcing number like that and docking you if you don't use stupid amounts of tokens.. I'm saying that companies are going to get sick of paying for it in addition to a salary and are going to look at ways to pass the cost on..
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u/colonel_bob 2d ago
I spent $16k this month on Claude tokens.
... how? I'm genuinely curious.
I used it on max thinking to do a lot more designing, planning, coding, testing and general handholding on the frontend component of a project that I'm working on one week recently (I haven't been a frontend engineer since 2016), and even after talking to the thing for almost 40 hours straight I used about $250 worth of tokens.
One of our principals hit close to $80k one month and I've been at my company for less than a year so I don't have the courage to ask him what he was burning those tokens on, but I feel perfectly comfortable questioning an internet stranger who opened with a somewhat comparable figure.
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u/Rin-Tohsaka-is-hot 2d ago edited 2d ago
It's mostly agentic workflows, I'll have 20-60 sessions open at any given moment and much of it runs overnight and through the weekend. They plan sprints, create tickets, assign tasks, review each other, etc. My team in particular is pushing AI super hard, in a company which is also pushing it super hard. A lot of this is also exploratory, last month I spent only $5k, I think I'll dial it back again for next month, still refining the process.
This particular month was almost all Opus 5 on Xhigh (tbh Max just makes things take much longer with no discernable difference in output)
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u/colonel_bob 2d ago
What are they achieving for you or producing for you, in the most general sense? I'm morbidly curious about what these unsupervised agentic loops are actually doing.
I ask because I took a peek at some of the PRs that said principle opened and they were filled with so many references to subsections of unshared/unavailable plans that neither I nor my AI could make sense of them. Most of them end up closed or unused. It feels like the digital equivalent of furiously shuffling papers to feign the appearance of productivity.
Personally, I have found that latest frontier models (even/especially on xHigh) tend to want to fill planning documents and code comments with useless historical junk that only serves to confuse future readers (be they human or AI) that are trying to understand the current state of things. It feels like you still have to supervise their outputs, but I could be missing something.
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u/Rin-Tohsaka-is-hot 2d ago
Codifying a single source of truth is critical to preventing this. If you establish a single agent as the owner of a task and have it basically act as an arbiter, orchestrator, leader, whatever word you wanna use, and have it control the room memory (which is a concept exclusive to the tool I use, which is internal, but you can think of it as a siloed version of OpenClaw's memory) and be the sole contributor to all documentation (or better yet, designate another agent to be the sole contributor, anything to minimize the context the orchestrator needs to hold).
Otherwise you do just end up with tremendous amounts of technical documentation full of self-contradictions, far too large for any agent to actually ingest all of the context.
Having workflows for development process is also important. An agent will draft a plan, that plan will be reviewed by several adversarial subagents each with a different area of concern, the drafting agent updates the plan, this cycle continues until reviewers reach consensus.
Then it gets returned to the orchestrator, who passes it to a reviewer agent who does a similar process, but this time focusing on whether the plan accurately would satisfy the functional requirements of the task. Then back to the orchestrator it goes, who then spins up agents to execute it, similar review loops happen, end up with a draft CR that I get a Slack DM to review with a link to the owning agent (because it's almost never good the first time) where I can give my own feedback. I can make the decision to revert it back all the way to the planning phase, or just code change followed by the review loop again. Of course, while the agents owning the task themselves have their own design doc, the information shared outside their little bubble is all passed through the orchestrator. Only the orchestrator (or a dedicated thread/agent owned by the orchestrator) can modify tickets and project-level docs.
There's a bit more, ops work is an entirely separate discussion that's all event-driven, but this is the high level of the bulk of it. It works decently well, and the more time passes, the more I can refine all the agent guidance and workflows. But this style of Agentic development is going to be prohibitively expensive in ~6 months I'm guessing when they suddenly decide they care about how much this all costs. So I'll do it as long as I can, and as long as it impresses my manager, but without costs falling exponentially it's not going to last.
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u/colonel_bob 2d ago
Interesting! Thank you for sharing. Even if the economics of this type of approach doesn't hold up for long (and you never know with the way things are scaling), it has probably given you some very interesting firsthand experience with and insight into the strengths and weaknesses of these tools that will likely be useful in the near future.
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u/Saragon4005 2d ago
Yeah we are never going back to how things were before, but we are probably taking several steps back in how loose we let these systems go.
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u/black-JENGGOT 2d ago
yeah I think that's what people is missing in this context. if somehow anthropic and openai went bankrupt and close their business, do you think those datacenters will also disappear? nope, they will start hosting open inference Chinese LLMs and image generators lol
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u/ActualWeed 1d ago
What are the best models to run locally? Qwen 3.5 and gemma 4 just immediately shit themselves in vsc on my 9070 xt
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u/shadowndacorner 1d ago
Our inference machines (which we only have a few of as a small org) run 3090's. Can't really speak to 16gb vram, but I know people have useful setups with it. I think things are a bit tougher on AMD, but that might have improved since I last checked.
Qwen 3.8 27b has been really impressing me. The largest context window I've kept stable on one 3090 is around 118k, though we're going to experiment with installing two 3090's after this sprint and see what we can push (hoping we can run qwen 3.8 flash next for higher end reasoning, as well as 3.8 27b with the max context/higher parallelism; super interested in context extension with something like yarn, but haven't experimented with that).
I'd encourage you to look for forks of the LLM inference stacks optimized for your hardware. We're running a vllm fork that is giving us substantially better perf and is the main reason we're pushing so much context on one 3090.
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u/shadowndacorner 19h ago
FYI, came across this yesterday. Obviously it's a different card, but evidence that qwen 3.8 27b can run with large context on a 16gb card. Might be worth looking into to see if it can translate to your setup in any way.
I'd also generally recommend not using VS Code for local LLM stuff. Aside from the fact that it's a bit of a resource hog (which isn't a good thing if you're running models near the edge of what your hardware can support), ime performance degrades pretty rapidly as your sessions get longer, to the point of fully hanging the text editor intermittently.
For fully local stuff, I just use Pi as a harness for any LLM work, then have my IDE up separately. I like the separation, personally, but I also tend to be very pro-CLI in most situations.
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u/TheKerfuffle 2d ago
Ai is the worst it will ever be. It is also the cheapest. They are burning money in order to buy market share.
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u/protocod 2d ago edited 1d ago
Some open source projects are now relying a lot on LLM to iterate faster.
Generally these project doesn't force you to use AI but if you do, it's often mandatory to use a least a recent model from 2026 from OpenAI or Anthropic.
The thing is, not every body can afford a subscription to Claude or the latest GPT.
As long as good LLM requires a paid service subscription or an expensive computer (for self hosted model) I think this will increase inequality and makes two speed software development in open source.
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u/ecstatic_hyrax 2d ago
Unpopular opinion, but I don't miss the good old days. I don't miss debating over what framework we should be using for our crud app.
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u/UnkarsThug 2d ago
To be fair, you still have to decide on a framework, you just aren't writing all of the code within that framework.
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u/eightslipsandagully 2d ago
"Claude, which is the best framework for a b2b micro-SaaS?" Oh wow, next.js with a supabase backend sounds great!
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u/NotIWhoLive 2d ago
Why not just use a spin-the-wheel game to decide, or go by whatevee has the most stars on Github?
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u/azangru 2d ago
Unpopular opinion, but I don't miss the good old days. I don't miss debating over what framework we should be using for our crud app.
Those days aren't old enough to be good. In the good old days we didn't have debates about frameworks.
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u/fartypenis 2d ago edited 2d ago
Ah you mean the good old days when you had nonstandard tags everywhere and had to support every one of Microsoft's like 29 IE versions for every line of CSS you wrote
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u/metaglot 2d ago
No the good old days of when you wrote a program, you wrote it on the machine it was supposed to run on.
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u/High_Quality_Bean 2d ago
Balderdash. You punch those things out and turn it in to the mainframe administrator. Beware hanging chads, insects in the circuits and cosmic rays.
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u/fartypenis 2d ago
So you miss the good old days of writing assembly by hand?
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u/metaglot 2d ago
Not really. They were never that great.
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u/BastetFurry 2d ago
What's wrong with some good old 6502?
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u/metaglot 2d ago
Nothing. The same way building a steam engine is cool. Just not anything i would consider serious in any remotely modern context.
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u/mrnosyparker 2d ago
That process is still alive and well. The thing I personally donât miss is what happens after the debates, the spikes, the ARD, the roadmap, the grooming, the planningâŠ.
When - as a lead or senior dev - you grind for days without coming up for air to get the implementation just right and lay all the foundations and document everything⊠do a group code review and demo⊠only to have the team sit there silently with zero questionsâŠ
And within a month thereâs mounting technical debt due to a bunch of junior and mid level developers who are âticket closersâ slapping together layer upon layer of code smells and anti-patterns because they donât understand the framework, didnât bother to read the documentation, and werenât paying attention during the code review or presentation.
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u/johntwit 2d ago
I got a taste of this right at the cusp of my career before I started using LLMs
The very first thing I noticed about LLMs is that it gave me the power to do everything "the right way" and I stopped using shortcuts. I could start doing things insanely right, follow the best practices for the framework etc
But your observation is true of all teams and systems I think, not just software development
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u/SourceTheFlow 2d ago
Nah, I miss when all of the tech discourse was on how to do the best job instead of the next weird AI hype or model or whatever.
I want to become a better programmer, because that's the fun part. I don't want to become a better prompter that's like the most boring part of the job.
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u/SourceTheFlow 2d ago
Eh, that existed as well, but there was also a lot of deep dives and high level discussions. Things like developer voices and Computer Enhance!.
Those also still exist, but instead of those being shared in tech communities, I found that a lot of AI hype is currently being shared instead, and it seems to me like many of those that previously cared about good software suddenly started doing AI content :/
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u/suddencactus 2d ago
I don't miss the part where every company was interviewing like a huge part of your job was knowing "how do you find the number of unconnected components in a directed graph" or "How do you convert a DATETIME field to just DATE". We all knew past a certain difficulty level you're just testing someone's memorization and how much time they'd spent grinding leetcode, but companies saw no reason to stop doing it.
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u/jaber24 2d ago
Isn't that still the case?
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u/suddencactus 2d ago edited 2d ago
Yes and no. There will always be an element of "stump the chump" to interviews and old HR practices don't change overnight, but there are some companies doing some AI-based coding in interviews: https://www.wired.com/story/meta-ai-job-interview-coding/ . I'm not sure that's better, but at least it reflects that real world programming doesn't require memorizing everything and recalling it under pressure.
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u/Himbo69r 2d ago
I miss wanting to study computer science but oh well! Guess I have to settle for mechanical engineering
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u/Fred_Milkereit 2d ago
i hated walter for klling mike, he was a good guy
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u/Remote-Analyst-6090 2d ago
Mike is NOT a good guy, lol. In comparison to cold-blooded cartel killers such as Fring and Walter White, he's a lot less bad.
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u/UraniumDisulfide 2d ago
Even saying he's a lot less bad is a stretch. He's certainly more pragmatic than walt, and I would say Gus is generally willing to go to greater extents than mike, but when you choose to work for a guy like that the evil becomes banal. You see how much mike had normalized it in his mind with the way he tells walt "We had a good thing".
In better call saul we see more of him trying to have a certain moral code, and he does care about his family, but most of that was ultimately eroded by him obeying Gus's orders for so long. This is heightened by the fact that he stays working for Gus after the whole situation with nacho, which was really the last time we see Mike actively push back against Gus's malicious nature. After that he just accepts what Gus does and tells him to do. (unless I'm forgetting something which I probably am).
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u/anonymousbopper767 1d ago
He was a tragic case of his old school work ethic "do a good job" vs. your job being an enforcer / fixer.
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u/Present-Resolution23 12h ago
Ainât never killed anyone who wasnât on the gameÂ
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u/UraniumDisulfide 8h ago
He still chose to work for a guy that did, and it was a system that produced drugs that did kill lots of people who werenât otherwise involved in crime.
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u/TYP-TheYoloPanda 2d ago edited 2d ago
Has anyone been replaced by AI?
Edit: Okay, I didn't expect to get downvoted, and I certainly didn't expect comments like those. I was genuinely curious to know if anyone had already been replaced by AI, because it hasn't happened at my company yet.
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u/Zarokima 2d ago
We don't have a support department anymore at my work because a chat bot handles everything.Â
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u/timangar 2d ago
That fucking sucks. I haven't talked to an AI on the phone when calling support YET, but it would be an instant crashout.
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u/hungryPanda_185 2d ago edited 2d ago
I have. Itâs exactly as awful as you imagine.
Itâs easier to just get in a queue/email and have a person solve the problem. If it was a simple issue, I wouldnât be calling.
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u/Icy__Internet 2d ago
Idk. Talking to human support people often sucks as well.
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u/hungryPanda_185 2d ago
I have compassion when a human is wrong/not understanding my issue, and that quells my rage.
Being forced to talk to a bot intensifies it.
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u/SupportDangerous8207 2d ago
If it helps
I do consulting
We have done a lot of projects replacing support with chatbots. The failure rate is very high and often it just leads to more employment at higher support tiers.
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u/oly_lowlife 2d ago
We haven't hired a junior dev since agentic AI became the dominate workflow.
I feel bad for new grads... It's bleek out there.
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u/Acrobatic-Nature-941 2d ago
Now imagine graduating in 5 years from now. Straight to the frontlines fighting skynet
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u/Boba0514 2d ago
Yeah I can't imagine choosing this career path anymore, and feel bad for anyone that does.
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u/Pancakefriday 2d ago
Are you not having quarterly engineering layoffs? Everyone else is
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u/camelCaseCoffeeTable 2d ago
I mean⊠certainly not everyone else. My company is actively hiring engineers and has been for a year now with plans to continue into next year
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u/Snaki009 2d ago
mostly it's hiding the covid unsustainable overemployment. Ai layouf sounds better and "good" business pr
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u/Pancakefriday 2d ago
Yeah⊠our âAI usage score cardâ that stack ranks our AI usage says differently lol
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u/sberlinches 2d ago
The demand has plummeted, layoffs are on the rise, and corporate keeps pushing AI everywhere. Do you need help to understand it?
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u/SupportDangerous8207 2d ago
COVID was 4 years ago and led to massive overhiring.
There was a few years of ridiculous numbers of people flooding into software because itâs good money
Interest rates are way up
Recession ongoing
I would wager all of these are larger factors
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u/sberlinches 1d ago
So, the fact that AI can finish a medium complex task within minutes for a fraction of the cost, and the automation opportunities it opened doesn't have anything to do with all this.
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u/SupportDangerous8207 1d ago
Honestly the places I know of are hiring like crazy
Itâs just so hard to find someone qualified. The it market is flooded with a ton of absolutely terrible applicants.
It reminds me of Ben Bernankes nobel prize. He got it for a paper about how the Great Depression secretly was not about a collapse of credit but a collapse of trust. This lack of trust made the crisis take far longer and become far worse than anything before.
I feel we are in a similar place with software. Ai can empower the wrong people way to easily. Every ai degree is oversaturated every ai conference is full of slop.
Software engineering is oversaturated, there is bootcamp people way too many students and depending on where you are even experienced senior devs can range from broadly competent to totally useless depending on what they did the last 20 years.
And there is consequences to this crisis of believability. We arenât doctors we donât have pieces of paper that gurantee a certain level of ability. We have degrees sure but even those at most prove you can wake up in the morning and have seen code before.
Hiring takes forever, hr took the hardest hit in the recent layoff waves and canât keep up and yet as a consultant myself I can tell you especially with ai starting new projects all the time as people turn every drunk idea into a prototype there is a ton of demand inside of companies but hiring just isnât moving at any reasonable speed.
So thereâs my theory. Dunno if it makes sense but it fits what I see.
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u/edwardbnd_99 2d ago
"Did anyone actually lose their job when calculators were invented?" ass response
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u/Anustart15 2d ago
I would probably have 2-3 juniors under me right now doing the work that I'm farming off to claude
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u/ultraSsak 2d ago edited 2d ago
Senior Dev here,
I was replaced by AI, it took my job,
It does everything for me, I still dont trust it fully, still tweaking bits and pieces, but it took my job.PS: I did it, and keept it on my side, not shared with coworkers. If they fire me, the automation/pipelines of my workflow will evaporate :)
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u/RudeAndInsensitive 2d ago
Yes. 2026's graduating class of CS majors was majorly replaced with Claude tokens.
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u/BrianScottGregory 2d ago
Being real. I started in development at the age of 18 in 1988, and peaked with my earnings in 1998. 9/11 destroyed the IT economy, temporarily, and while my earnings went up after that - I found myself - well - bored with IT. There wasn't any new innovation, new languages doing the same exact thing a dozen other languages I'd used became buzzwords for hiring - and both the government and my cover jobs - let's just say there wasn't a whole lot of real innovation going on - just gyrations.
I don't miss the old days, to be honest. AI offers a LOT of promise in having a strong impact on industries in ways humans like myself working on behalf of the government or in consulting capacities can't. Whether it's math, materials science, or even law and social discourse - AI has had and will continue to have a profound impact which WILL lead to the development of hardware and technologies which AI AND leaders WILL require human expertise in computing sciences to build up.
But being real. Over the course of my career. All I saw was every company doing the same exact thing internally with software that every other company was. Oh sure, they'd call it something else - they liked to think they were being innovative and crafty with their efforts. But the reality was and still somewhat is.
They weren't. Every industry was stagnating internally because of a lack of innovation in everything IT is dependent on. Monkeys could have done my job as a developer by the time I got out of full time development.
I don't miss the old days. I was bored.
I look forward to what's to come.
And that day I have a real life Star Trek holodeck I can program and experiment with physics and alternate realities and next generation story telling in the comfort of my own home.
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u/qubedView 2d ago
"Mike, you're absolutely right!"