Its easy to be optimistic when you're sitting on millions (dhh). You literally don't need to care about how any of this affects your job security.
Its easy to be optimistic when you're sitting on millions (dhh). You literally don't need to care about how any of this affects your job security.
Right, or paying for AI models in general.
There is a world of difference of having tens of millions of dollars and paying hundreds of dollars a month for AI subscriptions vs someone making 100k / year doing the same.
For the DHH's of the world that's not even something to think about, but for most people who are working (even in tech), now we're talking 2-8%+ of your income depending how much you use AI. Just to have the "luxury" of being able to experiment with it. I use air quotes on luxury because I personally find a lot of AI results to be quite bad, but then again, I'm not spending hundreds of dollars a month on the premium models.
You think 2-8% is a problem? There's a large world outside the US. "Hundreds of dollars" per month is most of my salary, I can afford that only by going hungry half the time.
Probably going to if I want to keep my job, since I'll be making about the same amount of money moving boxes or cleaning toilets, only in much less comfortable conditions.
I make 55k working at a dental office and a restaurant and I'm paying 200$ a month on open source models because I'm having an absolute blast with them.
Plenty of jobs have expenses built into them. Maybe a subscription is more than it used to be, I had great jobs on a used 200$ thinkpad, but it's still cheaper than being a photographer. And 100k is more than most jobs.
Software dev, even if it's all agents now, is still pretty dang economical
It's easier to enjoy it if you don't see how the sausage is made.
I am definitely not having a blast at work with LLMs. Everyone in the team has become simple rubber-stampers for whatever the AI puts out. There are mountains of documentation which gives a false sense of understanding of how things work, but the code repository itself could have been written in Brainfuck and it would make almost no difference. And we keep getting told by management that this is fine. We've become simple janitors in the slop hall.
Yeah, I'm sorry to hear that. I'm very glad I am not dealing with anything even remotely corporate during this time, because I'd absolutely hate it
I'm paying $20 a month using opus 5.5 and having a blast.
20 a month and using sonnet mostly for random fun stuff.
At work, it seems a bit different - I'm certainly having to declaudify things it can be hard starting there's a lot to dig into - you can see it's overwritten but need to understand every detail to sort it out.
Meta just gave DHH $1m in credits fwiw
You can pay $5 for deepseek 4.1 flash and be on the pareto frontier. And you can pay between $20-200/month for a huge amount of usage of the absolute frontier models. I was concerned about costs a year ago but with the proliferation of great cheap models, I think it's no longer a concern at all. I'd be fine if I could only use 4.1 flash.
I think the fear, threat, and valuation, of the frontier labs is that they will cross some line and have models that are infinitely smarter and more capable than everyone else. If that should happen, your deepseek account would be meaningless.
But I also think that premise is bullshit and not gonna happen.
sure but if that's the case society and i will have much bigger problems anyways
The premium models are worth 10% of your income at least.
There is no future without these models. They truly are an entirely different league than the cheap stuff. You can move mountains with Astra or Opus 5.5.
10% of a software engineer salary is a lot of money. That's just ridiculous.
Like the other commentor said, its just going to be a net negative, because whatever productivity increase you supposedly do get, you will see exactly 0 of that translated into salary increase.
Have you tried to negotiate a 10% pay raise because “you can move mountains with Astra or Opus 5.5”? I’d wager you’re more likely to get a “the fuck do we need you for then” than that pay raise.
The whole AI issue is and always has been a social question. It's hardly a ridiculous concept to have a skilled worker control a $10k budget to buy tools. In many fields that is normal.
Previously, the tools in our field were free or trivial cost. Seems like that has changed, that's OK, there are models to solve that.
I teach a couple courses currently, there is an enormous gap between what my students can create with AI and what I can create with AI. I don't think it's that much smaller than the difference of what we can create without, the only difference is that the schedules are compressed.
Let’s see the moved mountains I’m sitting here waiting to see any improvement in software
On the contrary, I say software got even worse
Even if you believe this surely it should be paid for by the employer not the individual.
I swap between Fable and GLM 5.X and both work fine. Fable tends to do stuff that I didn't want it to do, and claude is probably a bit more capable as a harness (though I haven't spent the effort configuring pi properly yet so that's probably on me). Otherwise it's hard to spot the difference.
I think you're off by a few orders of magnitude on cost.
People generally don't have 10% of their income to just give away on a whim.
Additionally, if I'm 10% more productive I don't get a 10% pay increase.
> You can move mountains with Astra or Opus 5.5.
Mountains that were made out of molehills, an ever-growing heap of bullshit.
The list of people who have made millions and would be indifferent when the source of those millions is being challenged can not be very long.
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> It’s easy to be optimistic when you're sitting on millions (dhh).
It’s natural to be pessimistic if you are unskilled. Your ability to keep your job is directly proportional to how good you are.
Nobody believes that