Comment by lifeisstillgood
10 hours ago
Isn’t this a question of how much the “terrorised survivors” spend on tokens to make the output “canonised”?
I think the main argument that the billions spent are not going to be recouped is accurate, but I strongly suspect the cost of producing high quality code will remain the same -just being produced faster (speed, cost, quality - you still only get to pick two)
If one Steve Yegge can burn tokens in “Gas Town” that cost as much as me and ten others then you have saved my salary but spent it on Steve’s token use for roughly the same code quality as me steve and ten others would have produced in three months - just it took steve three days
Same price, faster delivery. Is that a win ? I suspect that facebooks recent announcement (“we cannot think of enough things to do with software so who wants our GPUs?” Might suggest that it’s a business model problem more than a software probkem
I suspect "same price, three days instead of three months" is a very real win for plenty of businesses
That’s a good point. I am torn between two competing strains of thought, though:
- on the one hand, time-to-market is super important. Getting to the right place faster is obviously better.
- on the other hand, figuring out right product/right fit is hard, and if a business spends that much cost every 3 days chasing every idea (most of which may be bad ideas), they’ve probably wasted a lot of money.
Obviously token costs are cheaper than developers, and local models would reduce costs still further. But the thought I keep coming to is: maybe there’s a benefit to slowing down and not jumping to implement?
I usually hear the opposite side (better to implement 10 things and throw out 9 of them, easier to react to prototypes, etc.). But I also think the infinity of possible ideas doesn’t get smaller when you throw more engineers or compute at it. You just end up exploring more, possibly bad ideas. This works out if exploring more of the space builds a greater understanding of the problem and increases the likelihood that one of your choices pans out. But the cost of exploring the space isn’t $0 and 0 time.
Replace "plenty" with "all". At that cost, there is not a single business out there that won't benefit from a tool somewhere in their operations that they couldn't have invested in before.
And it's certainly not the same price!
It would be a real win if you could get it. However I don't see it happening. AI has been around long enough that if it was we would see it in new features by now.
Good analysis. Infact, there's collaboration cost in AI when it comes to quality, but a much smaller team can put out same quality things in a shorter time. As such it's same quality for cheaper, for sure.
Can they?
What products are you talking about? Because I see smaller teams or one man bands putting out low quality prototypes, but not teams of 10 delivering a years work in a sprint.
I'm seeing that a tech lead is preferring to work with 1 other engineer on a large project, and they're thinking through and presenting the architecture to others. But in prior time, this project would have been the lead + 2 seniors + 4 entry to mid level engineers to do it.
Everyone else in the team is now just aware of what's happening, and understand the architecture from the meeting to review / discuss it. But implementation and rollout is fast and just by the 2 of them.
The lead told me maintaining the quality was so much easier for the 2 of them with the right AGENTS.md lines, as he didn't have to spend time fixing guiding many people to do the right thing in PR reviews.
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