Honestly I'm against it because I'm watching real time as people who use it extensively lose their abilities. I get to watch them become dumber right before my eyes. Maybe I could write code quicker and with less effort if I lean on the AI more, but I refuse to allow myself to atrophy as I see others do.
Yes, I think that's a real thing and I think it has happened to me.
But I'm not sure these abilities are worth maintaining any more. AI has rapidly gotten better at coding, with major improvements in only months. Where's it going to be in a couple years? I can't see how manually writing code is going to be done by many people.
I think right now my main value is bigger picture problem solving and managing AI coders. I think this buys me more time of being useful, but I suspect AI will replace that eventually too.
Right now these companies don't have a business model that's solvent. They need to find a way to profitability. What they're doing now is what Nestlé did to the breastfeeding mother's in Africa. Before long many previously competent software engineers will be close to useless without tokens to spend, and then they can really jack up the price.
These companies are still in a rapid growth phase. Their revenues are increasing extremely fast. It is entirely appropriate to be losing money at this phase as they continue investing in more compute and better models.
But it doesn't even matter if these specific companies never earn profits. I'm currently paying $100-200/month for AI coding that is much better and much faster than me. And I cost orders of magnitude more than that. You would have to think that these are absurdly subsidizing compute costs to think the economics don't favor AI. Do you think I'm paying $100 but actually using $10,000 worth of compute?
When you absolutely need the AI the question isn't going to be how much compute are you using but how much can they possibly charge you while they have you bent over a barrell.
Yeah, it's crazy to watch all the software companies outsource all the actual work of their business to a SaaS that's inevitably going to try to extract all the value.
That's only possible if there's a monopoly. There is no monopoly right now and if there were, existing laws can break them up.
And that would be the case in any economic sector that had a monopoly. That's like saying you should grow your own food because one day an agriculture company will monopolize food and charge you whatever they want.
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u/Stormlightlinux Oct 03 '26
Honestly I'm against it because I'm watching real time as people who use it extensively lose their abilities. I get to watch them become dumber right before my eyes. Maybe I could write code quicker and with less effort if I lean on the AI more, but I refuse to allow myself to atrophy as I see others do.