For sure, because copy pasting from stackoverflow was already to difficult. Everyone loves writing business logic in computer understandable words. Name it LLM, programming language, calculator, there is still parser and interpreter. The only switch is attempt to replace deterministic machines with not deterministic machines by reducing machine error rate to acceptable percentage.
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#82[flagged]
That's literally what automation is. You could make the same argument against the power loom. People did!
The speed and scale are different. The power loom took a while to replace a subset of jobs. It didn't make "manual work" obsolete overnight.
"Going into trades" isn't gonna save you. Knowledge work is 40% of the workforce. Whose electricity are you gonna fix when people can't afford a house?
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#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Small companies using AI are going to kick the sh*t out of large companies that are slow to adapt. Big companies are sales machines and their products have been terrible for ages. Microsoft enjoys the top spot in software sales only due to their sales staff pushing impossible deals every year.
It's true the big company products have been terrible but they also enjoyed a moat that made it harder for competitors to enter. With this moat reduced I think you'll find this approach doesn't work any more. The smaller companies will also hire the good sales people away.
History suggests otherwise, and there's nothing particularly special about this moment.
Microsoft survived (and even, for a little while, dominated) after missing the web. Netscape didn't eat its lunch.
Then Google broke out on a completely different front.
Now there's billions of dollars of investment in "AI", hoping to break out like the next Google... while competing directly with Google.
(This is why we should be more ambitious about constraining large companies and billionaires.)
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#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's literally what automation is. You could make the same argument against the power loom. People did!
The speed and scale are different. The power loom took a while to replace a subset of jobs. It didn't make "manual work" obsolete overnight. "Going into trades" isn't gonna save you. Knowledge work is 40% of the workforce. Whose electricity are you gonna fix when people can't afford a house?
I don't agree, but at least that's an argument.
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#85If written business logic can become code at near-zero cost, people with good product sense can build without buying a big engineering org. That pressure shows up first in commodity SaaS getting repriced (already happening). Meanwhile hyperscalers are leaning harder into being the platform layer by making huge investments, because if apps are easier to create, the durable value shifts to infrastructure, operations, and distribution. Great times.
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#86The zero cost argument is so hollow it’s got an echo.
The systems that allow this are notoriously underpriced, and yet nobody wants to confront the simple business logic that today’s free beer can’t and won’t last.
Elevating this phase as the normal state of LLM usage costs is plainly dumb and a terrible business take.
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#87If written business logic can become code at near-zero cost, people with good product sense can build without buying a big engineering org. That pressure shows up first in commodity SaaS getting repriced (already happening). Meanwhile hyperscalers are leaning harder into being the platform layer by making huge investments, because if apps are easier to create, the durable value shifts to infrastructure, operations, a…
But it is zero only if you accept that:
A - the substitution via AI is good enough to equal everything a business needs to work properly and be sustainable long term. I would argue it does not. A business is NOT just its core tech element.
B - the cost will always remain subsidized by investors’ stupid money. It will not
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#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's literally what automation is. You could make the same argument against the power loom. People did!
The speed and scale are different. The power loom took a while to replace a subset of jobs. It didn't make "manual work" obsolete overnight. "Going into trades" isn't gonna save you. Knowledge work is 40% of the workforce. Whose electricity are you gonna fix when people can't afford a house?
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#89Re: You Are Here
#90If all you were doing is taking requirements from someone else and poorly coding them up (and yes I know a decent % of the industry matches close to this) then yes you are obsolete. Something just as useless but much faster now here. If you are part of the requirements process. If you find problems to solve and solve them. If you push back on requirements when they are not reasonable. Etc. Then you still have a caree…
> If all you were doing is taking requirements from someone else and poorly coding them up So, in your entire career, you've always worked in companies where you were a subject matter expert on everything the company did? Always knew the business domain inside out? You were running the numbers, sitting with customers, and determining yourself what they really wanted? > If you push back on requirements when they are n…
> So, in your entire career, you've always worked in companies where you were a subject matter expert on everything the company did? Always knew the business domain inside out? You were running the numbers, sitting with customers, and determining yourself what they really wanted?
You don't have to be the only person involved in the requirements for you to be involved. So yes, I've been involved from my very first internship where I pitched a new product to the CEO in my second month on the job and got told to go make that happen.