My lived experience over the past few months is proving you wrong. I started with your position and have since been able to see how good the tools are when properly used. I've also noticed a huge gap in ability among engineers and I think the gap is widening. My theory is that some folks have the premium tools and some don't and the ones that don't are sort of in this weird limbo where they are sort of stubbornly annoyed at the idea of having to pay for these things so they lash out. Understandable but ultimately self defeating. You can in-fact force the LLM to use any pattern you want. I encountered this recently with a hand made framework I wanted to upgrade. It did stuff I didn't like. But well guess what? I provided it new constraints and it started to do what I want. Be as opinionated as you want. That's the whole point. It's basically your intern.
> My theory is that some folks have the premium tools and some don't and the ones that don't are sort of in this weird limbo where they are sort of stubbornly annoyed at the idea of having to pay for these things so they lash out.
At my last job the employer paid for OpenAI access for all of us.
Baby sitting an LLM is not my idea of meaningful use of time. And reviewing code that someone else had an LLM spew out even less so.
I am not lashing out because I don’t have access to LLMs. I had access and I did try it plenty.
So tldr you don't have it now and have no frame of reference.
This is really low effort man. You can do better than "You're not paying enough to be as good as me" followed by "oh...well you haven't paid this month."
When I encounter people who don't use these tools it feels more like talking to someone without a computer who is trying to convince you that you don't need one back in the 90s. Or someone being like "the internet is useless" back in 1995. I mean early days it was kinda like that. The early internet for normies was almost entirely useless.
The change has been so rapid that I think a lot of people are having a hard time I guess wrapping their head about the lived experience of it. For a while my only access to the tools was through work. Then I ended up getting a $20/month ChatGPT account and that comes with codex and now I can't imagine sitting there Googling a problem anymore. It literally feels low tech these days. Big "I'm not paying for Cable, the antenna is good enough" energy. It saves me soooooo much time just maintaining my own local stuff. I mean it literally saves me hours and hours of personal labor.
The local models will 100% catch up. Most likely the inference I use now will be free in five years across the board and you'll be buying a cyberdeck or something with a 128G of RAM and an LLM friendly bus architecture.
Ah yes the “you’re not paying the ai labs enough” argument.
My total usage for this month is less than one days pay.
How many days pay do you think would be your limit? It seems inevitable that prices for power users will rise dramatically in the next few years.
Don't confuse the cost of org wide LLM services with coding. Two different things. Most people at any org probably just want ChatGPT so they can write reports and do research. And now they want it to sync with Google Drive or w/e so they can pull in docs. Obviously that stuff is classic B2B Software as Service hosting. Prices will go up just because that's how B2B prices work when enterprises negotiate yearly services but overall it's not the most expensive line item by a long shot and power users are only a small sub set of the population of all the users.
But for code it's a race to the bottom because it's all text and local works quite well. You can host models on LangSmith and similar and because people use those services to create chat bots the overall use of them for coding is a very tiny fraction of their overall usage. The race to the bottom is further exacerbated by the fact that as GPUs become more powerful you can host more per unit so the cost of text inference will drop precipitately. Right now people are reporting that for some of the self hosted services they are able to do everything for under $5 / month. That price WILL drop because that's how computers work.