Comment by plaidfuji
15 hours ago
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/$s_!_ZW2!,f_auto,q_auto:...
Judging from the fact that the Opus 4.5 inflection point was not really anticipated, and we still don’t really know what threshold was crossed that suddenly made agentic coding accessible to so many more people, I think it’s safe to say we don’t know what the thresholds will be until they’re crossed. The fact that we don’t know exactly what they’ll be isn’t a good reason to think there won’t be any more.
> The fact that we don’t know exactly what they’ll be isn’t a good reason to think there won’t be any more.
Nor is it a good reason to think there will be more.
We should expect to see the process slowing down first. Until then we should expect it to continue with pretty high likelihood.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!_ZW2!,f_auto,q_auto:...
I think we have quite good reason to expect more. As I said, we already know (caveat with your level of irrational skepticism toward the overwhelming evidence) that the best existing models are better than the ones publicly available.
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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?
Feels like everyone should be on one hand. On the other hand it also feels like a massive recalibration of what companies can/should do. They spend massive amounts of money on AWS, Datadog, GitHub, CircleCi, et al. If it becomes easier to host/roll your own it's a big increase in the demand for engineers.
Ultimately software is everything these days and the economics make the demand insatiable. We've gone through many cycles of "X" but on computers/web/mobile. There's going to be a massive amount of "X" but with AI companies that will need engineers.
Or at least this is what I tell myself to sleep at night.