Comment by leptons

>what are you doing with all your time if you aren't reviewing the code and trying to make it maintainable?

I was told I'm not supposed to read pull requests at my job anymore (we all do agentic coding now), I'm just supposed to click "approve" on PRs because for some stupid reason it still requires several humans to approve the PR. Instead of reading PRs, we're all telling the AI to do more work to create even more PRs. It's not a good way forward, and I'm looking for another job.

>If hosted solutions get too expensive, people will selfhost.

To self-host a frontier-adjacent model at speed comparable to a commercial API, you're looking at roughly $250k-500k to buy or $20-35k/month to rent the GPUs. And that's only enough to operate at current "frontier" model capability, and buying also doesn't include the massive amounts of electricity it will cost every month to run that hardware. Admittedly I used AI to come up with those figures, so take it with a grain of salt, but judging from how much these AI companies are spending, it tracks that they are consuming massive amounts of money on a per-user basis just to gain market share. I've tried to self-host AI and it sucks. I wouldn't use it for coding.

>I think AI is here to stay.

Sure it is, but it may not cost what you think it should cost.