Where to, that's the question. The economy is in the gutters and the replace-people-with-AI craze is making the issue even worse.
Where to, that's the question. The economy is in the gutters and the replace-people-with-AI craze is making the issue even worse.
Perhaps for now. But you know, after working solid with AI for two years and adopting effective methods using detailed plans, and having a lot of success with it, here is the problem:
Coding faster leads to less understanding and higher long-term risk. Source-Code amnesia is real, and there’s a time requirement to really understand and appreciate what a system is actually doing.
I’ve been able to implement very large features using frontier models, but the code needs to always be revisited.
AI can do two things: find vulnerabilities, and prototype code. It cannot design software, and any appearance of such is an illusion at best.
We don’t need to produce faster to be successful, we need to create better, long lasting products.
> Coding faster leads to less understanding and higher long-term risk. Source-Code amnesia is real, and there’s a time requirement to really understand and appreciate what a system is actually doing.
This is why I have switched nearly all of my personal coding experiments over to Qwen3.6 27B. Opus make it easy to gloss over too much and to delegate too much. And so I don't build sufficient memory of the code to provide long-term oversight.
But Qwen3.6 27B sits on an really interesting balance point. It understands code well enough to get 80% of the way to a good design, and it can fully implement a well-specified feature. But if my understanding of the code starts to weaken, things start going wrong much more quickly than they do with Claude.
Opus will happily take complex code beyond the point of salvation, if you allow it. I'm currently cleaning up a successful prototype code base right now, one that was partially vibe-coded and now needs to be put into production. And Opus generated massive amounts of tech debt. So clearly people who lean into vibe coding will need to keep upgrading their models for many years to keep up with the mess created by earlier models.
Strong agree (although I'm on Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, with 6-bit quant.). If you're a programmer, it gets the job done. When I occasionally don't want to care about the code, I switch over to DeepSeek V4 Pro.
Opus is relegated to the planning / design phase.
> It cannot design software, and any appearance of such is an illusion at best.
Have you tried Claude Opus 4.7?
Yes I use Opus 4.7 regularly as my daily AI tool. It can do incredible things for sure, but more in the sense of pure intellect not much in “emotional” or “creative” intelligence.
For example you might have a great design/architecture session and then run out of context. The next agent tries to piece things together from fragments of conversation and such. But it often starts going off on tangents, searching overly broad to understand, misses cues and nuance, all-the-while burning tokens.
As other articles have put it: AI makes doing the easy things easier and the hard things harder. Because hard things require creativity.
To bring this back to the original post: companies need people, and they shouldn’t expect that they can fire half their workforce and replace it with AI. Quite the contrary. The faster companies move with AI the more technical debt they’ll end up with it’s a guarantee.
“If you want to travel fast, go alone. If you want to travel far, go together.”
Now as you can see from the article, it starts turning. People are getting less pricey than agents on API pricing.
Copilot switches to API pricing starting next month (let's see how long it will last for our $39, and $19 since September), Anthropic switches all corps into API based pricing. From the most popular choices I think only Codex didn't switch yet (although it is hard to tell because I don't know their enterprise pricing).
The Chinese models are going to look really attractive.
I have DS-V4-Pro agents pretty much running 24/7. The cost is inconsequential. The same cannot be said for anything from Anthropic.
> The economy is in the gutters
Consumer sentiment is in the gutters certainly. But objective measures of the economy like unemployment and real wages look good to excellent
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
What is in the gutters is memories of 2008-2010. That was the last time folks experienced a bad economy. I remember Ed Elson saying something along the lines of "who cares about employment, what matters is inflation". Sure, if you're 27, you haven't got a clue what a bad economy looks like.
Unemployment and CPI : The most false statistics on the planet. Instead, look at employment population ratio 25-54, and core inflation. That will FREE YOUR MIND.
It's easy when you can just lie. The data from phone surveys is increasingly divergent from the delayed payroll data.
> But objective measures of the economy like unemployment and real wages look good to excellent
Oh hell no, ever since the tail end of Biden the trend for unemployment is showing upwards when corrected for seasonal effects [1], and for real wage growth the situation has been worse for an even longer time [2] - if not for the effects of the post covid stimulus packages plus emergency wage raises following the energy cost explosion thanks to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The story the stonk markets tell is completely decoupled from reality, partially because the AI wash trading bubble keeps distorting the statistics, partially because no matter what the stonk markets only can grow up because pension contributions keep blowing up the market [3]. Not getting that difference was what blew up Biden's reelection and is now screwing over Trump.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...
[2] https://www.atlantafed.org/research-and-data/data/wage-growt...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48233492
And open positions are simply because someone decided to run from that place