Comment by mchaver
8 hours ago
> The thing is, agents aren’t going away. So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things.
Following the model of how startups have worked for the last 20 years or so, I expect agents to eventually be locked-down/nerfed/ad-infested for higher payments. We are enjoying the fruits of VC money at the moment and they are getting everyone addicted to agents. Eventually they need to turn a profit.
Not sure how this plays out, but I would hang on to any competencies you have for anyone (or business) that wants to stick around in software. Use agents strategically, but don't give up your ability to code/reason/document, etc. The only way I can see this working differently is that there are huge advances in efficiency and open-source models.
That's one of several reasons why I'm trying not to rely too much on LLMs. The prospect of only being able to code with a working internet connection and a subscription to some megacorp service is not particularly appealing to me.
Local/open LLMs are a thing though. You can build a server for hosting decent sized (100-200B) models at home for a few k$. They may not be Opus-level, but hopefully we can get something matching current SOTA, but that we can run locally, before the megacorps get too greedy.
Alternatively you could find some other people to share the HW cost and run some larger models (like Kimi-K2.5 at 1.1T params).
Even when they're profitable, the premium ad-free service will still be cheaper than humans, so those skills will still be mostly useless.