Comment by hirako2000
19 hours ago
My take is that was the plan all along.
Once people won't be able to think anymore and business expect the level of productivity witnessed before, will have no choice but cough up whatever providers bill us.
19 hours ago
My take is that was the plan all along.
Once people won't be able to think anymore and business expect the level of productivity witnessed before, will have no choice but cough up whatever providers bill us.
Didn't they move too soon then? People haven't forgotten how to tie their shoelaces (yet). And anyway, they'll just move to a different model; last holdout wins.
They probably don't have much choice with burn rates and investors, tbh. Market is shaky, etc.
Too abruptly for sure.
>and business expect the level of productivity witnessed before, will have no choice but cough up whatever providers bill us.
Is that bad? After all, even if they hiked to price infinity, you wouldn't worse off than if AI didn't exist because you could still code by hand. Moreover if it's really in a "business" (employment?) context, the tools should be provided by your employer, not least for compliance/security reasons. The "expectation" angle doesn't make sense either. If it's actually more efficient than coding by hand, people will eventually adopt it, word will get around and expectations will rise irrespective of whether you used it or not.
The insidious part is the thought that if you spend your limited learning and recall on AI Tools, then you wont be able to "still code by hand" because you'll have lost the skill, then there will be a local minima to cross to get back to human level productivity. Of course you'll get PIPed before you get back to full capacity.
This comment reads as trying on principle to defend the use of AI.
My argument was not about AI. Rather about the practice of Anthropic and the likes.
> if they hiked to price infinity, you wouldn't worse off than if AI didn't exist because you could still code by hand
This was addressed by the words that you perhaps mistakenly omitted from your quote:
> Once people won't be able to think anymore...
People who aren't able to think anymore, can't still code by hand. Think "Idiocracy".
>People who aren't able to think anymore,
OpenAI and Anthropic have been getting stingy with their plans and it's only it's been what, 1 year, maybe 2 since vibecoding was widely used in a professional context (ie. not just hacking together a MVP for a SaaS side hustle in a weekend)? I doubt people are going to lose their ability to think in that timespan.
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And it’s working larger because the other models haven’t figured out how to provide a consistent, long running experience.
"enshittification" gets thrown around a lot, but this is the exact playbook. Look at the previous bubble's cash cow: advertising.
Online advertising is now ubiquitous, terrible, and mandatory for anyone who wants to do e-commerce. You can't run a mass-market online business without buying Adwords, Instagram Ads, etc.
AI will be ubiquitous, and then it will get worse and more expensive. But we will be unable to return to the prior status quo.
But why would they make the product shittier and not just more expensive? A lot of the complaints have been the model getting lost and going rogue.
Because sometimes you can make more money by reducing costs and making something shittier (especially if you do it covertly), compared to increasing prices.
I suspect more customers are lost a lot faster when you increase prices, compared to enshittifying the product. It's also a lot more directly attributable to an action, and thus easier for an executive to be blamed if they choose the former over the latter.
The odds of that happening are high. Trillions invested.
It occurred to me an outright rejections of these tools is brewing but can't quite materialise yet.