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Comment by echelon

11 hours ago

AI is my jet pack.

I was a fantastic IC and built really amazing software. I'm an even better AI-empowered engineer.

The old era is dead. The new one is exciting.

The problem is now the AI can do for $100 what took you 3 months full time.

Employers previously hired you because cheaper alternatives such as offshoring were impractical…

Now the AI is cheaper, faster, and better than domestic labor and offshoring while still hosted domestically…

Some will feel one doesn’t need an experienced rockstar to babysit an AI…

In about an hour I just solved about 80hrs worth of personal coding/debugging with a portion of a $20/month Claude subscription… Frankly it makes all my knowledge and experience feel kinda worthless… I only gave it a few sentences…

  • My POV is that indicates you need to up your expectations for yourself. You apparently have the knowledge and experience to cause 80 hours worth of work to be completed in a few sentences given today’s tools.

    So then, given your knowledge and experience, what challenge would require 80 hours of real, focused work out of you using today’s tools?

Yes until the AI labs start charging the real price.

  • When AI labs mature and inference costs start to matter, they will start optimizing for inference cost instead of sacrificing everything for intelligence.

    But even without that, open weight models are already good enough and everyone would be fine with paying unsubsidized prices for them.