Comment by tokioyoyo
4 hours ago
Honestly, I keep hearing this argument, but the past 2 years have shown the opposite. OAI/Ant are not the only companies providing inference.
There are legitimate FAANG-like companies that have general guidelines about “when to use Fable/GLM/DS” and etc. to keep the costs down. And I think it’ll continue that way.
You didn't address the argument about tech debt. How do you get the greatest quantity of maintainable, high quality code within a given token budget? The answer, at least so far, seems to be human experts in the loop. We've also been hearing for years that LLMs are going to automate away software development entirely, but software job postings are steadily rising.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/11/ai-software-developer-jobs.h...
>How do you get the greatest quantity of maintainable, high quality code within a given token budget?
Doesn't matter as much. The cost of "maintenance" is going down, from what I can see internally, from other companies, and every story i'm reading from other organizations as well. Token budgets are changing, but model quality and effectiveness are going up as well.
> We've also been hearing for years that LLMs are going to automate away software development entirely, but software job postings are steadily rising.
I think this has been contested from day 1. SE jobs might be automated, but jobs might increase, if there's possibility of starting new companies / new investments / etc.
I'm still not clear on what you're really saying. If a human programmer's input doesn't matter at all, then anyone should be able to prompt a model until it spits out the software they want. That might work today for building fun tech demos, but I don't see it happening on projects that have a minimum bar for security/reliability and long-term maintenance. Would you say, for example, a team of 10 managers with no software experience can be as successful as a team of 10 expert programmers at building a large project like an operating system, with both teams having access to the same AI models and budget?