They still gotta figure out how their consumers will get the cash to consume. Toss all the developers and a largish cohort of well-paid people head towards the dole.
They still gotta figure out how their consumers will get the cash to consume. Toss all the developers and a largish cohort of well-paid people head towards the dole.
Yeah I don't think this get's enough attention. It still requires a technical person to use these things effectively. Building coherent systems that solve a business problem is an iterative process. I have a hard time seeing how an LLM could climb that mountain on it's own.
I don't think there's a way to solve the issue of: one-shotted apps will increasingly look more convincing, in the same way that the image generation looks more convincing. But when you peel back the curtain, that output isn't quite correct enough to deploy to production. You could try brute-force vibe iterating until it's exactly what you wanted, but that rarely works for anything that isn't a CRUD app.
Ask any of the image generators to build you a sprite sheet for a 2d character with multiple animation frames. I have never gotten one to do this successfully in one prompt. Sometimes the background will be the checkerboard png transparency layer. Except, the checkers aren't all one color (#000000, #ffffff), instead it's a million variations of off-white and off-black. The legs in walking frames are almost never correct, etc.
And even if they get close - as soon as you try to iterate on the first output, you enter a game of whack-a-mole. Okay we fixed the background but now the legs don't look right, let's fix those. Okay great legs are fixed but now the faces are different in every frame let's fix those. Oh no fixing the faces broke the legs again, Etc.
We are in a weird place where companies are shedding the engineers that know how to use these things. And some of those engineers will become solo-devs. As a solo-dev, funds won't be infinite. So it doesn't seem likely that they can jack up the prices on the consumer plans. But if companies keep firing developers, then who will actually steer the agents on the enterprise plans?
> It still requires a technical person to use these things effectively.
I feel like few people critically think about how technical skill gets acquired in the age of LLMs. Statements like this kind of ignore that those who are the most productive already have experience & technical expertise. It's almost like there is a belief that technical people just grow on trees or that every LLM response somehow imparts knowledge when you use these things.
I can vibe code things that would take me a large time investment to learn and build. But I don't know how or why anything works. If I get asked to review it to ensure it's accurate, it would take me a considerable amount of time where it would otherwise just be easier for me to actually learn the thing. Feels like those most adamant about being more productive in the age of AI/LLMs don't consider any of the side effects of its use.
That's not something that will affect the next quarter, so for US companies it might as well be something that happens in Narnia.
> But when you peel back the curtain, that output isn't quite correct enough to deploy to production
What if, we change current production environments to fit that blackbox and make it run somehow with 99% availability and good security?
esp when it comes down to integration with the rest of the business processes & people aroud this "single apps" :-)
Like before - debt!
This prevents the consumers from slacking off and enjoying life, instead they have to continue to work work work. They get to consume a little, and work much more (after all, they also have to pay interest, and for consumer credits and credits that the masses get that adds up to a lot).
In this scenario, it does not even matter that many are unable to pay off all that debt. As long as the amount of work that is extracted from them significantly exceeds the amount of consumption allowed to them all is fine.
The chains that bind used to be metal, but we progressed and became a civilized society. Now it's the financial system and the laws. “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” (Anatole France)
Why do we need people to consume when we have the government?
Serious question. As in, we built the last 100 years on "the american consumer", the idea that it would be the people buying everything. There is no reason that needs to or necessarily will continue-- don't get me wrong, I kind of hope it does, but my hopes don't always predict what actually happens.
What if the next 100 is the government buying everything, and the vast bulk of the people are effectively serfs. Who HAVE to stay in line otherwise they go to debt prison or tax prison where they become slaves (yes, the US has a fairly large population of prison laborers who are forced to work for 15-50 cents/hour. The lucky ones can earn as much as $1.50/hour. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2017/04/10/wages/
where will the government get the money to buy anything if the billionaires and their mega corps have it all and spend sufficient amounts to keep the government from taxing. we have a k shape economy where the capital class is extracting all of the value from the working class who are headed to subsistence levels of income and the low class dies in the ditch.
At some point rich people stop caring about money and only care about power.
It's a fun thought, but you know what we call those people? Poor. The people who light their own money on fire today are ceding power. The two are the same.
At the end the day a medieval lord was poor but he lived a better life than the peasants.
> At the end the day a medieval lord was poor but he lived a better life than the peasants.
As measured in knowledge utilized during basic living: The lives of lords were much less complex than that of modern poor people.
1. Some people can afford to light a lot of their money on fire and still remain rich.
2. The trick is to burn other people’s money. Which is a lot more akin to what is going on here. Then, at least in the US, if you’re too big to fail, the fed will just give you more cash effectively diminishing everyone else’s buying power.
In regards to 2: it's as simple as not letting it be your money being set on fire. Every fiscally responsible individual is making sure they have low exposure to the mag 7.