Comment by lsy
2 hours ago
Yeah, claiming “product-market fit” on coding assistants for this multi-trillion dollar capital expenditure seems premature. Anthropic will post one and only one quarter of “operating profit” (aka losses after taxes and debt obligations) on the back of free-for-all spending by enterprise and engineer tokenmaxxing, neither of which will last. The investment was commensurate to a world-eating AGI, and if all that comes out of it is coding agents and slightly better enterprise software, I don’t think that makes up for the money spent.
The real question is: can you incentivize a non-tokenmaxxing Uber to spend the same amount on AI as they were when tokenmaxxing, just with fewer tokens and higher per-token costs? Even with plateauing improvement in frontier models? I think the answer may be yes.
And part of my reasoning for this is: the only system capable of actually fixing bugs in vibe-created code is an LLM. If we humans couldn't write it without assistance, we certainly won't be able to debug it without assistance. So there's a real stickiness here.
We're signing pacts with demons - we have to, if we want to outcompete the other warlocks - and those pacts are written in the very size of our codebases.