I think you might not get the context this is coming from, it’s about a game developer laid off from Blizzard not wanting to partake in the technology that will justify layoffs of their friends. Pretty straight forward to me.
Social implications are really hard to shake, but I agree it’s basically a lost cause fighting at this point. I’m hoping like Ed Zitron that it fails via some more durable reason.
You will not have a job in software in the future if you refuse to use AI.
I fully stand behind that prediction.
edit: despite the downvotes, I'll double down: most of today's software jobs will disappear. Your job, if it is in software, will disappear. It might transform into something new, if you're lucky. Or it might just go away entirely.
I guess I'm just confused by this sentiment. Are you making these conclusions while considering the fact that AI is still heavily subsidized? The economics of AI isn't quite the same as other software/tech.
I don't think it's going anywhere, but I don't know what happens when prices start to rise because these companies need to start turning a profit.
I'm happy using GLM 5.2 at API pricing. There will never be a point where essentially unlimited usage (i.e. what I, as a normal developer, can use at peak effort) of extremely good models will become financially unattainable.
> There will never be a point where essentially unlimited usage (i.e. what I, as a normal developer, can use at peak effort) of extremely good models will become financially unattainable.
The way you phrase this prevents refutation. But there will be a point where ordinary individuals cannot participate in the majority of the upside.
In the future, some class of models will require enormous compute that is outside the financial capital capability of ordinary individual contributors, middle class, and upper middle class. This will be sold as a capability to well-funded companies.
Yes, I don't disagree with what you're saying. I'm responding to a specific claim: that the capabilities we have now will become much more expensive in the future.
> For the vast majority of people who currently have a job in software... you will not have a job in software in the future whether you use AI or not.
The tide is coming for almost all of us.
I'll agree with you as soon as all video games are in the metaverse and run natively on the blockchain.
AI does your job. Robots do your job. These are real and substantial and actually provide enormous value. You can get more done per unit of time.
I want them to do my job and everyone else's jobs, I just want to make sure there's a functioning economy we can participate in and benefit from at the other side.
I've just built a $3M run rate company in five months on mostly AI outputs in Rust, which is rock solid code.
In my career I've been a six nines systems engineer. Stuff like billion dollar daily volume payments platforms, and my work was always situated in critical flows - so I know a thing or two about solid engineering work.
Just a moment ago I asked AI for a complicated multithreaded state machine with variational queuing logic. Claude Code Opus delivered. I'm reviewing it now. It's phenomenal code.
You need to reassess the world. Your priors are deeply flawed. These models are absolutely incredible.
I mean it - you're going to be hurt badly if you don't reevaluate what is happening and plan accordingly.
I think you'd be the first one, so I highly doubt that. If it's true, good on you.
I use Opus daily. It can take some typing off my hands, as long as I keep it to highly specific, limited, straight-forward things. And as long as I spend a long time preparing everything in the most minute detail. Then I have a chance of it being a slight efficiency gain. Veer slightly outside of those preconditions and the output is invariably impressive at first glance, garbage at second glance. Not to mention that it's barely any help for the 80-90% of the job that isn't writing code.
Even Jensen Huang expects the LLM efficiency boost to be about 30% for software engineers. Jensen freaking Huang, who has every reason to exaggerate the benefits! So I'm realistically taking that as an upper bound.
Run rate is easy to get while not meaning much (which is why GenAI vendors love talking about it). Report back in a year about how things are going, and how much of your code you had to rewrite from scratch.
>I mean it - you're going to be hurt badly if you don't reevaluate what is happening and plan accordingly.
What plans can most people reasonably come up with?
If AI is taking over software, it's taking over lots of other computer related jobs. If you're not a highly paid engineer, or come from money, most people can't just re-skill for entirely different careers.
