The alternative is something like the dotcom bubble, where a lot of fiber was layed, and while ultimately a lot of investment money was thrown in the incinerator the physical stuff became cheaply available. Or, if we're lucky, it's more like tulips, something that no one really needs and when the mania wears off most people can go back to ignoring.
I hope it ends up like tulips. LLMs can do some cool things but it isn't saving companies money and this isn't even the true cost of tokens and then we have it shoved down our throats in everything.
it wont, tulips had no value. im a dev with 10y experience and there are maybe 3-5 people on earth that could compete with top llm's when it comes to coding. it doesnt make me happy, i hate slop just as any other person but it doesnt make sense to tell yourself that its just a useless toy. its a generational leap that you could MAYBE compare to first computers that suddenly increased calculations you can make a second by 10000
What's fun about that, at least from what I understand from my code junkies, is that their jobs now consist of managing a fleet of bots and correcting their work, which is something they can do because they similar to you have 10+ years experience in writing code.
But companies aren't hiring entry level coders anymore, so eventually we're going to run out of people qualified to do what they're doing.....
we are very early down the road, imo its a matter of 5-10 years MAXIMUM before humans will at most be testing code. reviewing and rewriting with AI will become simply too fast and too reliable to waste time doing it manually
I am curious about regulated industries.
If you can convince an LLM to lie, could you hide your backdoors with its help?
Do we need separate models to both agree to be safe?
Should we even let AI models see our code for something regulated?
the only question is whether another llm would notice the backdoor
>Should we even let AI models see our code for something regulated?
we probably will not be able to afford NOT TO do it if others do it, question it whether those information will stay in your country, meaning whether countries will have their own llms on their own servers that they will be able to trust
Regulated industries already dont regulate who is writing the code but what kinds of tests need to be performed and coding standards need to be adhered to. Eg. for highly regulated stuff they're actually running verifications against the compiler output, because they can't trust it, let alone the human who did write the compiler input.
So I don't see a problem extending these requirements to AI agents.
Should we even let AI models see our code for something regulated?
Firefox is a pretty old software. Generally well established. When Mythic was turned on it, it found hundreds of vulnerabilities in under a week. Many of them critical. AI security bots are so much better at finding security vulnerabilities, and escalating minor vulnerabilities by exploiting chains of relatively minor problems to create a major problem.
We can't afford to let the most sensitive data in the world be left unprotected. Agentic AI is too good at coding.
Does this coding look like it can pay for the trillions of dollars in infrastructure needed to keep it going? Cause projections suggest AI won't start paying for itself for another 2 to 5 years and I don't think it lasts that long before the bubble bursts or some type of legislation kills it.
Coding is one of the places that it's likely to do able to deliver value. Tech as a whole generally doesn't mind paying more for work to get done if the time-cost scales horizontally.
And that's the basic value proposition that coding agents provide at a business level.
There is damage overall in that it kind of removes opportunity for junior engineers to get into the field and mature to senior/etc.
The rub is a lot of how you improve the efficacy of the ai agent is by increasing deterministic signalling. Just at a high level, it's better to have a tool that enforces a 80 character max line count than it is to have a comment in .claude/CLAUDE.md telling the agent we should follow that line limit (intentional simple example).
yes, the advantage it gives you over 'manual' coding is simply difficult to describe, in time the price will balance out, especially considering open source chinese competition that is also getting better
again, this doesnt make me happy, but i think there is no way around it
What? What do a couple of average coders have to do with paying for the trillions of dollars worth of data centers and electrical and communications infrastructure that needs to be built to run AI and how long it will take for that infrastructure to pay for itself? Did you reply to the wrong comment?
The reason "the vast majority" of restaurant aren't profitable in the first 10 years is because the majority of them actually do fail and never make any money. AI can't even start making money until after the infrastructure that doesn't currently exist is built and paid for (31 trillion dollars) on a fluctuating time table of 2 to 5 years that extends with every delayed data center and power plant. So which AI firms are eating these costs and failing? Oh, that's right they want tax payers to pay for the infrastructure which continues to push that 2-5 years until solvency into the nebulous future. The bubble is going to burst. You don't understand business.
The SEC is preparing to allow US stocks to trade 24/7 on the blockchain.
Next they'll shut down the circuit breakers. First this administration reduces reporting to twice a year. Then Bessent stops reporting on company organizations. This is a heist.
Famous investor Steven Eisman exposes a terrifying reality.
He confirms the entire stock market is dangerously propped up by a single AI trade, leaving the economy completely vulnerable.
He warns that if the AI bubble bursts, a massive correction is inevitable.
The AI gamble is about to have a reckoning.
5 companies, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Broadcom and Nvidia have accounted for 50% of S&P growth since April.
It's all debt swaps keeping itself afloat. Elon bought back his Russian Oligarch debt from the Twitter purchase with his XA\ debt. Then he's funding his spaceX debt with an IPO that will flop.
That AI bubble is going to burst. When it does it will be as fast as 1999, and as deep as 2008
Not really all that different from OP’s premise about the canals. Sorry I butthurt you so badly by pointing that out. You’re such a smart guy I thought you would have realized that yourself.
As someone in a completely unrelated industry, you are correct that it's not a toy.
There's are huge shifts going on in the financial and accounting world right now as literally everyone is trying to figure out how to best leverage the tools AI provides, and ultimately we've already shown that we simply cannot afford to not adapt to the superiority of the new tools.
This is 100% bullshit. I have never met a programmer who thinks that AI code is worth anything of value when it comes to actual code generation. They spend more time correcting basic code than they ever spent writing it, and if there's any level of complexity generated code is functionally useless. As in "can't remember what the variable name passed into a function was called so it just makes something up and ends up overwriting a critical global variable" levels us useless. As a middling programmer at best myself, I agree that it writes code I would have been embarrassed to put down when I was a beginner.
However, what it does really excel in is asking human-readable questions to reference documentation or show example code. Punching "Hey, I can't remember the process to establish a multi-dimensional data structure with a variable range" into your LLM of choice is an order of magnitude faster than trying to hunt down the documentation that deals with it, then trying to hunt down the errata that actually explains how to make it function.
The problem with AI as we know it isn't that it's useless. It's that we're trying to force it to do things that it really isn't designed to do and will never be capable of doing well.
Anyway, two month old account with a generic name and hidden history spouting the objectively incorrect benefits of AI is probably a bot.
yes im a bot, you caught me, you should call the reddit police, whats the point of even writing this, the bot will not read it or care
yes, you are right, i was actually spouting the objectively incorrect benefits of AI. do you want me to present you with counterarguments to that view?
Not sure how you could be a programmer and outright make above statement. Our teams started really slow with a lot of caution and guardrails adopting AI tooling. Its just few months in and now entire features are rolling in with a good portion of it llm generated.
Again with a big product, there would be quite a few senior staff who would push back, but all of the critcisms have been addressed and harnesses in place.
I havent checked your history, but you either are larping as a dev here or a paid china account that wants to muddy the pond for the other side.
I very clearly said I was, at best, a middling programmer. I do appreciate you not checking my history. Taking a peak at the last few days to get the gist of who I am is one thing (be ready to see a lot of r/cfb comments), but man I've had dudes go back years trying to find dirt on me. It's there if you look, I'm not denying that, it's just a super weird thing to do.
Anyway, quantify your statements. I can "AI is great it lets me be more organized and helps me brainstorm and stuff" all day long, but it's not really an argument until we get into "I had X problem and LLM solved it via Y process/method/action and saved me Z time".
I'm all for qualitative opinions as a part of a discussion, but when people start calling me out directly I do feel the need to defend myself appropriately. And "prove it" tends to work more often than not.
Coding is almost a religion, isn't it? All of this "code" they write....what does it do better? Most of it are for business applications that don't really do that much for the business, if anything.
Actually, those guys are more like the old school mafia. You insert yourself into a system and latch on like parasites. "That's a NICE CRM you got there.....be a shame if you didn't UPGRADE it"
THey don't really ADD anything to the process. They just bleed from it.
I never needed an "app" to get groceries. (And I still don't....fuck em!). But now they push me towards it. I got groceries just fine. All I needed. There is nothing more once I meet my needs.
Enterprise systems in business have so many layers and functions that look cool, until you finally need them to actually DO something. In the end, the real work still gets done via old school communication.
it doesnt matter what you think of apps, maybe you are right and they are useless or worse, but this doesnt change the fact that software production suddenly jumped in speed by 1000% or more and other areas of life will probably get a similar boost with time
Tulips have a value, just not buy a house with a bulb value. I think coding falls under "cool things" and have used it in my work but it doesn't need to be everywhere.
its not everywhere yet, thats the scary part actually. considering incredible, unheard of possibilities that this tech provides it still hasnt taken its toll on our world. you think its "everywhere" now? its nowhere yet, compared to what we will see probably very very soon
im a dev with 10y experience and there are maybe 3-5 people on earth that could compete with top llm's when it comes to coding.
I suppose that goes to show that YoE is a poor metric since you can apparently spend 10 years not even improving to the point of being able to do better than the slop machine. Because unless the 3-5 people on earth all work on my team, devs who are competent can still consistently do better than LLMs. The only ones it's even coming close to matching are the juniors right out of university.
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u/LordJim11 19d ago
Forgot to add this; https://ushistory.org/free-online-textbooks/us/the-rise-of-american-industry/25a-the-canal-era