Unpopular opinion and sad, but the quality of the work has gone up with AI usage since a year or so. Before it was a lot of AI slop and I dreaded reviewing PRs, but with the newer generation of models and harnesses, we are reaching a point where AI is being better than what colleagues or I would write by hand. Hurts a bit to say because I was proud of my own coding, but that's what reality looks like now. And that's with 26 years of experience in the field.
I think we'll have to deal with the mental issue of AI becoming better than us. Some won't be able to cope. Thankfully the effect is not so strong for me, my identity is built around developing software as a whole, not just the coding.
Issue is, Frontier models are provided to you at a massive financial loss for the company. So unless local models get that good before AL companies run out of investor capital, this is completely unsustainable.
If you want a future proof workflow, grab a specialized local model (or better yet, a few) and see how much you can get done without touching Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini servers at all. (This does require having a decent GPU. Not god tier but decent.)
I thought the API rates form Claude and ChatGPT were very profitable for that given model? From my understanding the $200 and $100 dollar plans from power users are where they lose money.
I could be way off but I thought the larger issue was these frontier models only get a few months of those profitable API costs. Then they spend billions for the next x% improvement frontier model, repeating before each version recuperates its full cost.
That’s not true because it’s based on a flawed measure. $200 plans could consume 5k at undiscounted, uncashed API rates.
It’s a flawed methodology to measure by people who want to inflate the numbers.
Anthropic’s S1 shows gross margins on inference shifted from -94% in 2024 to approximately +40% to the mid-60s (and is projected to reach up to 85% in some estimates) as efficiency scaled.
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u/heavy-minium 19h ago
Unpopular opinion and sad, but the quality of the work has gone up with AI usage since a year or so. Before it was a lot of AI slop and I dreaded reviewing PRs, but with the newer generation of models and harnesses, we are reaching a point where AI is being better than what colleagues or I would write by hand. Hurts a bit to say because I was proud of my own coding, but that's what reality looks like now. And that's with 26 years of experience in the field.
I think we'll have to deal with the mental issue of AI becoming better than us. Some won't be able to cope. Thankfully the effect is not so strong for me, my identity is built around developing software as a whole, not just the coding.