Comment by aspenmartin
1 day ago
What I also find confusing though is that folks seem to ignore trajectory which is maybe the biggest lede to bury. As Simon says, we have had "good enough" coding agents for 6 months, that is a blink of an eye, and at my company my job has now completely changed. It's almost like a dream.
And that's just one inflection point. We've had several and there are many more on the horizon. So while I could be convinced that ROI is maybe not even positive today despite the ridiculous enterprise spend, it's perfectly rational to pave the way today for what's coming over the next few months let alone years down the line.
There may be additional major leaps forward, and there may not. I kind of struggle to imagine what the next step actually is. Certainly there will be improvements in performance (speed) and cost. But at a point you reach a barrier where the limiting factor is the specificity of the human prompt and our ability to manage all the code we’re generating.
Somewhat oversimplifying; writing software and building apps was a bottleneck - now it is not. What is the next bottleneck that LLMs can solve? Is there one? And is there enough publicly available data to solve it repeatably at scale? Or did we just automate stack overflow searches and now we’re stuck again?
Or is the endgame of this innovation cycle the complete removal of interaction with machines through code? Will we simply interact with machine coworkers purely through natural language? Can an LLM make PowerPoint slides and run a meeting? So far not seeing much progress on that.
Based on how much money is chasing returns, and how steep the slope is, it's almost certain that we are still not at the end of this sigmoid cycle.
Sure, it might start to slow down, but even then we will likely see a doubling in the next 10-15 years.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!_ZW2!,f_auto,q_auto:...
Judging from the fact that the Opus 4.5 inflection point was not really anticipated, and we still don’t really know what threshold was crossed that suddenly made agentic coding accessible to so many more people, I think it’s safe to say we don’t know what the thresholds will be until they’re crossed. The fact that we don’t know exactly what they’ll be isn’t a good reason to think there won’t be any more.
> The fact that we don’t know exactly what they’ll be isn’t a good reason to think there won’t be any more.
Nor is it a good reason to think there will be more.
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I am currently eating lunch. Meanwhile Claude is triaging and writing reproducers for 70+ tickets nobody has had time to look at. Next it will attempt to fix them. I have not read the tickets. I will not look at the code until there are review ready PRs and a code review bot have done the first pass.
In other words, most of the prompting will also go away.
Are you not concerned that you, too, will go away?
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yeah but if you have to pay $2k to $3k per month, would you still use it?