Writing code is cheap now

Post by ej88 » Tue, Feb 24, 2026, 6:17 PM UTC

Ronsenshi wrote: post #334

ej88 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the top % of talent is still extremely hard to get, perhaps moreso saw an article recently where every sector is seeing a reduction in IT/devs except for tech and ai companies if your company is in a sector where eng is a cost-center and the product is not directly tied to your engineers / your company is pushing for efficiency it's an employer's market

I don't think it makes sense to consider top % of the talent - relative to the total amount of engineers I imagine it would be minuscule. It's the rest who will have to deal with shrinking number of positions, higher competition and possibly decrease in compensation due to said competition.

Post by skydhash » Tue, Feb 24, 2026, 6:38 PM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #411

skydhash wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many enterprises are currently exploring to see if they can invite developers to leverage AI tools—like they leveraged the compiler—to be more productive. To operate on a higher plane of agency, collaborating on what we should be building and not just technical execution. The thing is, developers have been hired to automate process, and as for any professional doing a good job, that means the output should perform…

> "Or a crane that will stall and drop its load randomly. It would have been sent to the scrapyard on the first day." The only reason you have the concept that engines can "stall" is because people have bought engines that can stall by the hundreds of millions, instead of the earliest people refusing to buy them at all and all waiting for the perfect engine. Container ships can sink with all the containers lost at se…

Post by simonw » Tue, Feb 24, 2026, 6:46 PM UTC

hansmayer wrote: post #407

simonw wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think most of us would be fine if the LLMs could actually just type out the code for us after we engineered it in our heads and explained it to the LLM in English language. Alas, they do produce some sort of code, but not always, or often enough not in a way we desribed it. That's exactly what they do for me - especially since the November model releases (GPT-5.1, Opus 4.5). > Where is the superintelligence we we…

> That's exactly what they do for me - especially since the November model releases (GPT-5.1, Opus 4.5). I mean it's inherently impossible, given the statistical nature of LLMs, so I am not sure are you claiming this out of ignorance or other interests, but again, what you claim is impossible due to the very nature of LLMs.

Post by trgn » Tue, Feb 24, 2026, 7:11 PM UTC

gitlinuxgreat wrote: post #422

trgn wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people became millionaires writing html 30 years ago. there's been these shifts in the past.

People became billionaires from domain names in the dot com era.

Post by zahlman » Tue, Feb 24, 2026, 7:18 PM UTC

tabs_or_spaces wrote: post #130

> Code has always been expensive. Producing a few hundred lines of clean, tested code takes most software developers a full day or more. Many of our engineering habits, at both the macro and micro level, are built around this core constraint. > ... > Writing good code remains significantly more expensive I think this is a bad argument. Code was expensive because you were trying to write the expensive good code in the…