Comment by jrjeksjd8d
2 days ago
AI coding has massive factors that should make it the easiest to drive adoption and monetize.
The biggest is FOMO. So many orgs have a principle-agent problem where execs are buying AI for their whole org, regardless of value. This is easier revenue than nickle-and-diming individuals.
The second factor is the circular tech economy. Everyone knows everyone, everyone is buying from everyone, it's the same dollar changing hands back and forth.
Finally, AI coding should be able to produce concrete value. If an AI makes code that compiles and solves a problem it should have some value. By comparison, if your product is _writing_, AI writing is kind of bullshit.
> If an AI makes code that compiles and solves a problem it should have some value
Depends if the cost to weed out the new problems it introduces outweighs the value of the problems solved.
To be clear this is me making the most generous case for LLMs, which is that some people really do just want a shitty app to check a box. In my experience fixing LLM-produced software is worse than just writing it from scratch.
I think LLM writing replacing actual authors or AI "art" is fundamentally worthless though, so at least coding is worth more than "worthless"
I've got to wonder what the potential market size is for AI driven software development.
I'd have to guess that competition and efficiency gains will reduce the cost of AI coding tools, but for now we've got $100 or $200/mo premium plans for things like Claude Code (although some users may exceed this and pay more), call it $1-2K/yr per developer, and in the US there are apparently about 1M developers, so even with a 100% adoption rate that's only $1-2B revenue spread across all providers for the US market.... a drop in the bucket for a company like Google, and hardly enough to create a sane Price-to-Sales ratio for companies like OpenAI or Anthropic given their sky-high valuations.
Corporate API usage seems to have potential to be higher (not capped by a fixed size user base), but hard to estimate what that might be.
ChatBots don't seem to be viable for long-term revenue, at least not from consumers, since it seems we'll always have things like Google "AI Mode" available for free.