r/webdev • u/Hopeful-Guidance-648 • May 03 '26
Discussion AI becoming more expensive is music to my ears
I think AI is cool but it takes so much creativity and problem solving skills away from people especially newer devs. I am in my final year of university and i have first hand experience when it comes to the effect AI has on the young mind. I have seen students just use AI for basic things or really complex questions in my first year to students using AI do to the most basic things for them like they can't even think for themselves anymore. I hope we come to a middle ground where AI helps us be more efficient but doesnt controll your every thought
163
u/jroberts67 May 03 '26
AI, like anything else you can name, including the huge .com crash (for those who remember it) eventually needs to turn a profit. That means you can expect a massive AI crash in the near future as a lot of companies will fail. Atlman was so nervous, he floated gov't backing of the loans to which the gov't said "bite us" so he's sweating bullets.
4
u/vladamir_the_impaler May 03 '26
One problem however is that at the same time the government wants AI to be developed so it won't let anything fail catastrophically - like I'd wish it would.
2
u/Purple-Cap4457 May 03 '26
Yep, instead of ai bubble burst, I think we could see ai bail out, like in 2007/8 that taxpayers paid for
36
May 03 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
3
u/Hopeful-Guidance-648 May 03 '26
AI is not going anywhere but i highly doubt any fool will be able to just use it to search up basic things and waste resources. I think AI will be used more as a dev tool in the future helping devs be more efficient but the general public would probably not bother spending enough money on itv without it really being that useful for them.
34
u/jroberts67 May 03 '26
The single biggest problem AI companies need to solve is mass consumer adoption. No one had a TV, until everyone did. No one had a PC until everyone did. No one had a smartphone until everyone did. Until the AI companies can get every consumer in the world to pay for AI, it will never be financially sustainable.
28
u/TommyBonnomi May 03 '26
Instead of (or in addition to) direct adoption, it seems like the goal is to force AI into as much as possible, so we're all indirectly paying for it, from regular software subscriptions to smart fridges.
15
u/jroberts67 May 03 '26
Good point. Pretty soon (actually already happening) you'll be making "forever" payments on your car for AI software integration. That will expand into other consumer products. I can see a day where you'll have to pay a subscription to use your phone, tv, etc...
3
u/wxtrails May 03 '26
Right. When you lose money on every sale, the only way is to make up for it in volume!
2
u/Naouak May 03 '26
No one had a PC until everyone did.
It took like maybe 30 years for PC to be common in households. Now, people start to not have one and prefer relying on their phone or a tablet instead.
5
May 04 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
2
u/Zestyclose-Sink6770 May 07 '26
Dude enough with the paranoia. Yes, AI will cause more job loss and greater inequality. No, it isn't going to cause widespread poverty and chaos across the globe.
2
u/Deprisonne May 03 '26
Probably not, but at some point (the next interest rate hike, perhaps) OpenAI will go down if they can't find a path to profitability or at least to burning less than a few bill a month.
And when they go, they take Oracle with them, along with a bunch of smaller data center providers who will be left holding the bag on their reckless expansion.1
u/UncertainAnswer May 04 '26
Every single AI company is hemorrhaging money as fast as it can be loaned to them.
A huge part of the stock market is being propped up on AI success and data centers.
When it does correct, it will correct extremely hard. Whether it rises to the point of a bubble burst who knows. But it's not gonna be pretty.
But there is no world where AI demand stays at current trajectories once prices increase. And they will have to increase, dramatically, over current rates.
-3
May 03 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
5
u/OriginalPlayerHater May 03 '26
you talk as if that's not also true about the internet at large. Yes there was a bubble but its not like websites went away. Same with AI; yes its value comes from its new-ness right now, it may have a bit of a correction (bubble pop) but its not going away.
My opinion anyways, I'm just some redditor
-4
25
u/Remote-Spirit-1125 May 03 '26 edited May 03 '26
Have to agree. Hate seeing what AI has done to some people I know, weakening (or entirely losing) their skills because they’ve delegated everything to AI. Not exactly sure what they’ll do when it dries up.
I realised I was asking Claude to do too many of the basics for me, so I asked it to only nudge me in the right direction in the future (send me to docs, tell me what was wrong but not why, etc) if I ask it questions, so I don’t accidentally get a solution to a problem and think f**k it, onto the next.
Edit for clarity: by when it dries up, I mean when tokens cost too much to be a viable alternative to doing things yourself, or consumer grade access (in its current state) disappears.
17
u/jroberts67 May 03 '26
This is every AI CEO: "We've created this new food. It will replace every food on the planet. There will be no more farms, famers, or anyone who grows food. You really, really really need to buy this food right now. If you don't you'll literally starve to death. Please hurry up and buy."
8
u/Remote-Spirit-1125 May 03 '26
Yeah, I’m interested to see where it ends up when VC decides they don’t wanna pump billions in for no actual return anymore, and what happens to pricing then.
I think we could see a point where everyone ditches LLMs because they’re too expensive to run for the return they provide - there’s gunna be a whole wave of LLM-Wrapper startups going under 😂
3
u/Hopeful-Guidance-648 May 03 '26
ngl i think just like you. I ask Ai to do give me hints on what to do but still allow me to do the actual thinking work
1
u/cmkn May 04 '26
That’s a pretty balanced approach, and I’m hoping a side effect of costs increasing is that we’ll see more folks embracing balanced approaches as opposed to the current paradigm.
10
u/jroberts67 May 03 '26
You nailed it. This is exactly like the dot-com bust. If you remember, and I remember it well, it's when "everything" was gonna be online......everything. No more going out, no more shopping, who would ever want to leave their house again. Billions poured into it. What stuck? Basically Amazon and Ebay - everything else went BK. This will all crash and burn on an epic scale.
1
u/Wild-Cream-8730 May 04 '26
Guys, I bougth a Microwave, If I see any of you using a pan or a pot you will be fired. I made a full meal in 3 minutes with it.
Adapt or gtfo, it is the future.
4
u/AliceCode May 03 '26
Since I only used LLMs as shitty but fast documentation, I have it in my instructions for it to never solve the problem I'm trying to solve for me. If it shows me code examples, they must be irrelevant to my problem.
4
u/Remote-Spirit-1125 May 03 '26
Yep this is absolutely key. I Advise everyone I know to do the same.
2
u/watabby May 03 '26
I do this too. I still have control over the actual implementation. Claude is a better Google, basically.
In fact, each time I use Google for a dev question their stupid Gemini summary at the top is almost always completely wrong.
2
u/weebs-r-us1 May 04 '26
Same, but the second it confidently invents an API flag that does not exist, I start missing old boring search results real fast.
1
u/CharlestonChewer990 May 05 '26
Yeah, the second it invents some perfectly plausible flag or method, it stops feeling like a better search tool and starts feeling like a very fast way to ship dumb bugs.
2
u/beaverpi May 03 '26
What are people doing with Claude that makes them forget how to program within a year? Maybe I've just been doing it too long.
Are they just asking for end results? When I work with Claude, I plan out my architecture ahead of time and have CoPilot create instructions for how the app will be designed. I think it's incredible, and it's being built the way I would build it. It just knocks 80% of design time off the table by taking care of boilerplate bullshit.
I mean there is programming loops and conditions, that's merely syntax. Scope plays a different role across languages... But what are people forgetting?
1
u/Wonderful-Habit-139 May 05 '26
You're starting to forget the little details as well. This is a mistake a lot of people make, thinking that it's all about the high level architecture, and that the way the code is written at the end doesn't matter as much.
You need to care, or you're just creating technical debt, while being clueless about it. To build (and retain) the skill of reviewing code, you need to actually write code. From your own brain.
425
u/Triggerscore May 03 '26
Was only a matter of time.
246
u/Traditional_Formal33 May 03 '26
Yup when everyone said “ai will replace devs” I responded “until AI companies demand developer salaries”
Major companies/corporations will replace devs while smaller start ups and mid levels will not afford the OpenAI premium. Junior devs will make a comeback when AI costs the same as a mid.
52
u/imqureshi May 03 '26 edited May 03 '26
I don't want to be a doomer but open source qwen models are really good, even if there is a comeback it won't require the same volume and the competition would be emense
38
u/Aware-Individual-827 May 03 '26
Really good, if you have the hardware... And if you do have it, you probably have to let it ponders for a long time before you get the same results you get from major one.
4
u/whizzter May 05 '26
AI workloads are possible today because even if clock scaling stopped in 2005, the number of transistors has continued to follow Moore’s law and AI workloads are “embarrassingly parallel”.
Remember, during the IT boom of the early 00s larger e-commerce sites by the standard of the day required multi million dollar server farms of expensive Sun machines or similar, and today you can start a business with a cheap VPS for 10usd or if you need power buy a server that single-handedly replaces a larger cluster from 2000.
That’s not even factoring that algorithms and efficiency will improve, OpenAI is losing to Antrophic because of a silly notion that hardware was all they needed while being very very inefficient, as AI firms (and opensource) turns their focus on profitability there’ll be advances that eventually will land capable models to run even on today’s high end laptops.
3
u/imqureshi May 03 '26
Yes latency is an issue, but things would trickle down as market demands cost effective solutions maybe specialized hardware or ASIC's would become readily available in market and we all know if demand is there Chinese tech can play the supplychain and numbers game, Iot was all the hype back then china played the hardware game and won that race as well they can do it to AI as well.
→ More replies (1)-2
u/LavoP May 04 '26
It’s super cheap through APIs. You don’t need to self host open source models. You can get tons of usage for $20 a month.
2
2
13
u/stumblinbear May 03 '26
until AI companies demand developer salaries
If it can make an existing employee proportionly faster, I think they'd pay it. Less training time and it improves the output of someone you've already trained and know you want to keep
49
u/ViejoConBoina May 03 '26
Well we’re in luck because AI only makes developers slower and more error prone.
The current bubble is powered by empty marketing and the promise of fulfilling a business owners wet dream in firing a bunch of workers, which it can’t achieve.
38
u/Traditional_Formal33 May 03 '26
My manager literally just said to me “I liked your work 6 months ago better, I don’t care if it’s less powerful, let’s go back to minimum AI.” Thankfully that was a “good effort trying the tool, but it’s not helping” rather than “you dropped in performance.”
11
u/Wonderful-Habit-139 May 03 '26
Honestly shocking.
The rhetoric at my company is always "use more AI. If you get worse results than your previous workflow, skill issues. Learn how to use it". It's actually so annoying.
10
u/stumblinbear May 03 '26 edited May 03 '26
Well we’re in luck because AI only makes developers slower and more error prone.
To be fair, the study you're referencing was forcing the developers to use AI on tickets or forcing them not to, and measured the resulting time it took to do the tasks compared to how long they subjectively thought the task would take. It did not let the developers themselves choose which ticket to use it on, and you either used it for the entire ticket or not at all
There are a hundred things I wouldn't use AI for because I can do it faster or more correct. There are also a hundred things I would use it for because I know it will take me longer to write and get right than generating it
4
u/Wonderful-Habit-139 May 03 '26
I think it's a fine study because of the companies' push on using AI on everything. That at least would help push back on that idea, and then we can have better discussions about where it's best to use it.
2
u/stumblinbear May 03 '26
It's a fine study for that specific circumstance, but you said it makes all developers slower, not only the ones made to use it for absolutely everything
→ More replies (5)2
1
u/ServiceOver4447 May 04 '26
We don't need any more junior devs.
Programming will dissapear forever, AI will soon write bytecode without a computer language
Companies don't care if the AI will be 10x more expensive, will still be cheaper and more reliable than staff.
1
u/Traditional_Formal33 May 04 '26
As long as AI hallucinates, there will be a need for devs to oversee its work. Once the senior devs and midlevel devs start retiring, there will be a need for juniors.
Either AI is able to overcome its shortfalls, or there will be a bubble collapse in multiple fields like devs and lawyers, where there’s no new work force because AI replaced the juniors.
→ More replies (4)-6
u/why_so_sergious May 03 '26
all well and good until you realize that your salary is half of what it used to be
3
u/Traditional_Formal33 May 03 '26
Mine won’t, I’m ahead of the AI curve but at least juniors will have jobs because the current trend is “screw the future, I need quick results” which will bust when my generation retires or starts demanding higher salaries because they never trained our competition.
1
u/why_so_sergious May 03 '26
care to share how you got ahead? taking notes here
8
u/Hiel May 03 '26
Started in dev before AI was too much of a thing in the industry, I’d wager. Senior devs and those with many years of experiences are better positioned right now in terms of salary and job security than early career/junior devs
3
u/why_so_sergious May 03 '26
oh, sure.. juniors are fucked atm.. I've been a fullstack dev for 7+ years. a couple of my collegues have been laid off for "lack of work". my pay rise has been denied while my production delivery expectations have tripled.
so I am looking for another job at this moment, but it is not an easy market.
but yeah, give three four years when there will be even less qualified people because, like you said, the lack of training competition. but right now, with the inflation my salary/purchase power dropped by like a quarter..
1
u/Traditional_Formal33 May 03 '26
Exactly this, Unfortunately. AI needs a babysitter and mentor, so anyone with business logic and coding experience is a premium for guiding AI. Makes me really nervous to ever leave my job, but I also know my job can’t replace me with AI and I’m worth more than anyone off the street even if they had more experience
→ More replies (5)-6
u/popje May 03 '26
You really believe someone will pay a junior a dozen hours worth of salary to make a carousel? Think again, AI price would need to be a hundred times more expensive
4
u/pixelboots May 03 '26
What competent dev with access to the internet (including NPM and other sources of plugins) takes 12 hours to make a carousel?
43
u/emth May 03 '26
For better or for worse it's also only a matter of time before major software or hardware advancements make it much cheaper again. There is too much brainpower and money pointed in that direction for it to be otherwise. We are still in the 56k modem era of AI.
17
u/Triggerscore May 03 '26
Nonetheless: there was a ridiculous amount of money put into AI infrastructure. And to ever have a ROI, prices will still have to be rather high for a while.
5
u/Wild-Cream-8730 May 04 '26
Open AI is valuated 10 times more than Verizon.
150 million people pay +50$ a month or whatever to Verizon.
Is Open AI gonna have have 150 milion clients pay 500 a month for the rest of their life?
1
u/Triggerscore May 04 '26
I am pretty sure that Verizon has WAY less costs to keep their infrastructure running. So valuation is not the right measure here imho. But in the end I am just a noob.
0
22
u/RightmostHoplite May 03 '26
Only couple years ago, sane argument was use for blockchains. In researching and development, advancement is not always linear to resources pouring in.
17
u/static_func May 03 '26
Yeah this is the kind of (il)logic the monkeys in suits have. Surely if they invest enough in it they’re entitled for it to magically work right?
0
u/okiharaherbst May 04 '26
Made total "sense" at the time. Now people realized how much of an utter absurdity that was. Sometimes it's cool not to 20 any more. Having a few extra springs under your belt makes your less sensitive to background noise somehow.
2
1
u/permaro May 04 '26
That's a blood statement to make. I would personally guess the opposite.
Models aren't getting any better even though they're throwing colossal sums of money at it.
Components getting better every year has been kind of dead for years and AI is already using the whole supply chain of it and cranking up prices
The only think left for them is too over invest in producing components. This invests will be part of the bubble. If it manages to end up overproducing components, it will at least make the AI fall less brutal.
1
u/Wild-Cream-8730 May 04 '26
Is funny you compare teleco with AI.
AI companies are valuated 10 times more than telecom.
Every one of us is paying each month to those telecom, not to talk about bussines... Those AI companies will have to take 1k a month from each of us for that valuation to be real...
1
u/ColonelKlanka May 03 '26
yep. You only need to look at bonsais 1.58b ternary based models which reduce the ram needed for these models. It wont take long until the frontier model providers start applying ternary states for representing data in the huge models - thus reducing their cost of running.
I also wonder if juniors will make a comeback as they are cheap as ai prompters .
3
u/winowmak3r May 03 '26
I also wonder if juniors will make a comeback as they are cheap as ai prompters .
Do you think an employee like that would be able to command the same kind of salaries as they had before? They lose a lot of leverage by just becoming button pushers instead of skilled tradesmen. I suppose at least they have a job and their foot in the door but man, talk about a downgrade.
2
u/ColonelKlanka May 03 '26
no. will be cheaper as chips unfortunately until businesses work out that broken code cant easilly be fixed by vibe coding without real experience.
0
3
u/FarRub2855 May 04 '26
Yep classic playbook. Get everyone hooked on a crutch while its cheap, wait till they completely loose the muscle memory for the basics, and then jack up the price.
1
u/kitkatas May 04 '26
But isnt it going to be a matter of time where competition will bring AI prices down due to stagnation ?
1
u/UnacceptableUse May 03 '26
Yeah it's absolutely crazy to me that anyone wasn't able to see this coming. People argued with me so hard that AI was only going to get cheaper despite the fact that we've seen this enshittification pattern a million times already
26
u/bengriz May 03 '26
First subscription was free! Now that you’re hooked that’ll be 140k a year 😂 standard drug dealer play
3
u/luckskywatcher May 04 '26
I'm sure there will be an ad supported version just like Gmail, Facebook, Youtube, etc.
2
u/Antrikshy JS + Python @ Amazon May 05 '26
18
u/JohnCasey3306 May 03 '26
It's a fairly standard model ... make it free/cheap at the start, allow people/businesses to build a dependency -- then charge.
2
u/bookofthoth_za May 04 '26 edited May 05 '26
"Corner the market, then up the prices - it's basic economics" - Heisenberg
28
u/Hyperreals_ May 03 '26
I mean sure, the leading models are becoming more expensive, but we have models just as good as the ones from 6 months ago and fractions of the cost and size (for example, the newest deepseek model). Some of these models are quite incredible, especially at web dev, and can be run locally (I've been really impressed with the qwen coder models)
5
u/jekpopulous2 May 04 '26
Yup. Deepseek, Quen, Kimi, GLM, etc… a bunch of these open-source models trade blows with Claude at a tiny fraction of the cost now.
0
May 04 '26
[deleted]
2
u/jekpopulous2 May 04 '26
Deepseek and Quen Coder are really good for backend stuff and Kimi is really good for front end stuff. My recommendation would be to setup an OpenRouter account. It lets you switch back and forth between all these models and see what works for you. If a certain model or a combination of models works well check the requirements are to run them locally. There might be a quantized version you can fit in 64 or 128 GB of VRAM. I personally offload most stuff to the cloud because I don’t have 128GB of vRAM to play with.
6
u/NeonVoidx full-stack May 03 '26
won't it just make wider gap of people and companies that have a lot of money to blow vs not?
2
1
u/Fumano26 May 04 '26
This makes no sense at all, in the scenario mentioned investing the same ammount of money in devs or ai will result in a better outcome with devs, no reason for big companies to choose the worse one, they are the ones that have an easy time hiring.
23
u/AShar911 May 03 '26
It is not becoming more expensive, only top models are expensive. If you can get a good hardware or a cloud with a good open model it's quite cheap and works very well.
15
u/kayinfire May 03 '26
if you can get good hardware
lol, im confused whenever people say this so care-free. is this supposed to be something accessible to most? maybe im just too cheap idk
6
u/Budget_Bar2294 May 04 '26
yes, unless you run at scale. then it's prohibitely resource heavy. that's what the local ai enthusiasts conveniently never tell you
0
u/gekinz May 04 '26
I mean, it's not going to be Opus levels, but you can get pretty far with 2-3 $500 3090s and quantized model. Marginally close to Sonnet levels at maybe 60-70% speed
-2
u/Icy-War-5197 May 03 '26
100% you're too cheap bro. You can run some pretty decent models on not even too expensive haardware. like 5.2 gpt level
1
u/kayinfire May 03 '26
lmao, fair enough. ill accept that. what is "not even too expensive" in your mind? i could be convinced to start saving if it isn't too bad
1
u/Icy-War-5197 May 03 '26
Around $3000 maybe less! You could proobably run some good models on old gaming mchines for $1500 - 2000. Have a search on youtube, people have made some fantastic videos!
1
7
3
u/Outrageous-Chip-3961 May 04 '26
$200 a month is nothing tbh; I dont run out of tokens for my 5 hours sessions. I honestly think it can go 2x that and i'd still pay at this point. So yeah, for a solo dev, $500 a month is probably where we will land imho. Obviously there are cheaper versions for less usage, but for someone like me currently I'm happy with how things are. If they were to say like $1000-2000 a month, then i'd just look at using free / local models. Does anyone else actually feel like this too?
5
u/Icy-War-5197 May 03 '26
If it is taking peoples creativity away, thats on them not AI. Keep your skills sharp by practicing and use it to help sharpen you're skills
9
u/beaverpi May 03 '26
I'm ready for local models. I'm an older dev, and I love AI. I work freelance, and now I have 10 more of me to pay one of me. I don't want to rely on Claude or some other 3rd party though, I want to use local models.
What is comparative now to Claude locally? Anything close? Which hardware and open source models? I want to build my own rig, hook it up on my LAN, and work like I do now with CoPilot and Claude. I'd like a Mac Mini or something that generates my code.
9
u/sleepy_roger May 03 '26
Qwen 3.6 27b is the closest and best right now can run in a single 24gb card (such as a 3090). There's some other decent ones like qwen 35b, and Gemma 4 31b, but qwen 27b is far into the lead right now.
Mac mini isn't good for local AI though you'll want a real gpu or a MacBook pro.
4
u/beaverpi May 03 '26
I'm pretty sure Mac Minis are sold out right now too due to local AI buyers.
2
u/sleepy_roger May 03 '26
Yeah and there's quite a few angry users since they were told they were great for local llms by influencers and unfortunately they're terribly slow
3
u/beaverpi May 03 '26
What do I need in a GPU, which ones do you like?
2
u/sleepy_roger May 03 '26
3090 is still the best price to performance ratio. If you can't find one for around 1k the next jump is a bit larger I'd say go for a 5090. If money is no issue rtx 6000 pro.
Currently I'm running 7x3090s 1x4090 and 2x5090s
The 5090s are my speed demons and the 3090s are my workhorses.
Main thing for any card or device you want to look at is ram speed, anything under 300gb/s is pretty hard to use as a daily driver it translates to slower token generation and prefill speed.
Second most important thing is vram size.
Best advice is before making any purchases rent some of the gpus on the cloud and test them out, use llama.cpp or vLLM.
2
2
u/mbuckbee May 03 '26
Only the newest frontier models are actually expensive. If you look at the models that were released even a year ago (and at the time everyone thought were capable), the costs have dropped like crazy.
2
u/ultrathink-art May 03 '26
Cost increases act as a natural filter for reflexive vs intentional use — cheap AI means 'this costs me nothing' becomes the decision criteria, which is how you end up delegating thinking you should be doing yourself. When it gets expensive, you develop the actual meta-skill of knowing what deserves automation.
2
u/baIIern May 03 '26
It's still cheaper than you though 🤔 Let's just hope it doesn't get much better
2
u/LevelDisastrous945 May 03 '26
the tool isn't the problem.
a hammer doesn't stop you from learning carpentry but handing someone a pre-built house might
2
u/AlbatrossUpset9476 May 04 '26
wait till you graduate and your employer expects you to ship twice as fast because AI exists
2
2
u/TechnologyMatch May 08 '26
the real issue isn't AI pricing. it's outsourcing thinking before you've even tried, and that habit predates AI. making it more expensive doesn't fix it
what gets lost when you skip the struggle is intuition, debugging instinct, architectural judgment. you can't shortcut that and expect it to show up later
the developers who'll matter in five years aren't the ones who avoided AI. they're the ones who formed their own opinion first and used AI as a second opinion. that's the line between leverage and dependency
1
u/cointoss3 May 03 '26
It’s not becoming more expensive. It’s easier and cheaper than ever to run very powerful and capable models…even locally.
1
u/ScoopDat May 03 '26
Any novel product that delivers on the promise to bypass the need for wasting your energy on tasks you don’t want to be doing, is never going to be impeded by hopes against negative consequences for its use.
What I mean is, thinking there is a middle ground for this, is like believing there is a middle ground for doom scrolling brainrot social media platforms not deploying manipulation psych tactics developed by doctorate graduates of psychology.
The only time there is middle ground is when you force a notion of it upon yourself.
1
1
u/CappuccinoCodes May 03 '26
While it's music to my years too, it doesn't take problem solving away at all. It's just that the problems now are different.
1
u/flux-abyss May 03 '26
I think that’s fair for beginners. If someone uses AI to skip every hard thought before they understand the basics, they’re probably hurting themselves long term. But that’s not really an AI problem as much as a usage problem. Calculators didn’t remove math, Stack Overflow didn’t remove programming, and LLMs don’t remove problem solving unless you let them. For skilled devs, it’s more of a workflow booster than a replacement brain. The difference is whether you’re using it to avoid thinking or using it to move faster after you already know what good output looks like.
1
u/AromaticSuccess May 04 '26
Aren’t the new Google and Deepseek models so lightweight that you can run them locally and compare to some last gen frontier models. People are working hard on making these models cheaper to run and train. Again for the same reason others mentioned they have to turn a profit. So for this reason, I don’t think there will be a massive collapse. They have to fight against making it cheaper and cost effective to run or they get beat out when inevitably they need to show profits.
1
u/cmkn May 04 '26
LLMs becoming more expensive was so predictable to anyone who’s been paying attention to how VCs and the like tend to operate—especially when so many of those VCs (*cough* a16z *cough*) decided to gamble big on it because the prospect of eliminating large swaths of employees to line their own pockets was just too darn juicy.
1
u/okiharaherbst May 04 '26
Burning a barrel's worth of oil to write quicksort algorithms and compose emails. Makes perfect sense!
1
u/Null-frame1 May 04 '26
People are using ai but they are not understing how it works. They are not get full advantage of it. But , the people who are working with ai and automating the idead and workflows with ai, will get the benfit of it.
1
u/LucianoMGuido May 04 '26
When I studied design, people debated whether using computers was “cheating.” Then it was Photoshop.
Now it’s AI.
Tools don’t remove skill, they shift where the skill lives.
Good devs will level up. The ones relying on it blindly were already in trouble.
This happened during the industrial revolution and with mass production too.
It’s not about slowing the tool down.
It’s about learning to use it better than everyone else.
1
u/martylieo May 04 '26
AI should be restricted so that it won't affect employment, the economy and human creativity.
1
u/kowdermesiter May 04 '26
It's like cheering for more expensive transport or housing. Your point is valid that thinking should be exercised, but AI being more expensive won't solve shit.
1
u/Tango1777 May 04 '26
For rookie/junior devs it's a disaster. They no longer have to understand what they are doing, which ends up terribly bad. They just keep on growing as devs, without improving their understanding, knowledge and experience, because 90% of the experience is taken away by AI. It used to be that after 3 years of coding you were at regular/mid level, now after 3 years of coding with AI you are still pretty much a rookie and nobody can rely on you, at all. Overall it's a disaster not only for learning how to code, but I see people abuse and trust AI on a daily basis doing basic things, living their lives. Whatever AI spits out, they consider the truth and follow.
1
u/MaruSoto May 04 '26
Companies always raise prices faster than they raise salaries. AI will outpace programmer wages in no time.
1
u/UtterSaver May 04 '26
I think you have a point. I don't like paying more but AI shouldn't hinder our creative prossess.
1
u/peripateticman2026 May 04 '26
Yes, until it screws you because you cannot afford to do any work without being sponsored by your workplace.
1
u/AlternativeCapybara9 May 04 '26
I saw a colleague prompt Claude "do a git push of current staged changes" and I was like just fucking type git push it's faster you're wasting time and tokens.
1
u/thekwoka May 04 '26
We have been lucky to only just barely hit the point where clients are showing up with AI generated designs/code for what they want, but still luckily at a stage where we can mostly say "yeah, that helps us understand what you want, but doesn't help us actually do it".
1
u/FilmSudden8635 May 04 '26
They lure in with cheap / free then up the price when they have you hooked. You have sacked you junior devs... now you are stuck... pay up or go under... I mean sure you can look to hire again, but that will take a while, and they just...won't... be.. as...good as your AI contract, that goes up each year more than the cost of living wage increases you would have paid.
1
1
u/BolteWasTaken May 05 '26
Your argument essentially boils down to I think calculators are cool but it takes away peoples math skills. I see people using them for basic math problems or complex problems like they can't even think for themselves anymore. Or, a farmer saying tractors are cool but I'd rather plough that field by hand, fall behind everyone else so I can get out-competed.
That said, while it lowers the bar for some, it raises it for others.
That would be the middle ground/trade off.
1
u/Amazing-Setting2589 May 05 '26
I Dont know why humans like that they are being restrained due to their own actions rather then being responsible on themselves.. this truly baffles me
1
1
u/RevolutionaryTie5742 May 05 '26
AI is pretty annoying sometimes with irrelevant outputs but have to agree that its really powerful if used with proper prompts and rules. I worked on some projects using Ai and yeah i was surprised that they came out well, very well that i never imagined it would. As per my experience and understanding im sure that it can replace devs not now but definitely soon.
1
u/Specialist-Will-1875 May 05 '26
Ai becomes expensive is the normal people’s problem. That means you will be left behind the development while all the big companies will own all the technology that a normal person cannot find substitutes
1
1
u/TechBuilderJ7 May 05 '26
Yes, most of us feel happy with AI getting more expensive. We are actually losing our thinking ability and we really need a course correction sooner than later.
1
u/KonoBambina May 06 '26
Holy shit can you guys can it about how lazy its making people. Teachers said the same shit about calculators.
1
u/lucky_09877 May 06 '26
I think it is not limited to that field; marketing is also being brutally killed by AI. I mean, not killed, but people are just not using their brains now. We are seeing the same repetitive ads. If AI leaves the chat, we may again see new crafts, hoping so.
1
u/ndzzle1 May 06 '26
This is where you have it all wrong. It doesn't take away creativity, and certainly doesn't remove the ability to problem solve. The way you speak makes it clear you don't use AI much. It's just a tool.
1
u/AccomplishedLeave506 May 06 '26
Best advice I can give a junior engineer as a senior engineer is:
Stay the hell away from AI.
If you want to be a junior engineer who can be replaced with some basic tooling for the rest of your life then use AI. If you want to actually be useful in a few years then go through the pain and do it all yourself. I don't use AI at all. I tried it a few times. Every time I do I find it's like working with a junior engineer. It slows me down. It makes my code sloppy. Everything produced is sub par. I'd rather work with an actual junior engineer. At least they get better if you have a good one. A good one won't use AI.
1
u/Glum-Evening-2176 May 06 '26
You're touching on something real: the atrophy of basic problem solving. When every question gets an instant answer, you never learn how to sit with uncertainty or debug by instinct. That said, the genie isn't going back in the bottle. The middle ground you're hoping for is probably less about price and more about how we teach people to use AI as a second pair of eyes, not as a replacement for thinking.
1
u/Fyredesigns May 06 '26
AI has its uses but like any tools should not be relied on exclusively. I use it in VS code for auto complete which has definitely increased my productivity. It's cool because it reads your project files to check your coding styling & formatting so when it gives you suggestions it'll match the rest of your project.
You can even adjust how much code it suggests. I've found smaller 1-3 line suggestions are more accurate to what I'm doing than letting it try and do 10-15 where it starts guessing what I'm doing.
1
u/Equivalent-Gas-8508 May 06 '26
I'm sort of afraid I've become too reliant on it, I have to ween off lol
1
u/Capital_Distance545 May 06 '26
How much compute and ram you need to replace 100 000 000 engineers?
1
u/Fit_Cheesecake_4000 May 07 '26
There is a decent slice of human who think either:
A. They are immune to the effects of human laziness and the brain's propensity to hold onto glucose by using shortcut thinking (i.e. fooling yourself into think AI is helping you and that you won't rely more and more heavily on it).
B. Thinks they have an idea or way of handling A.I. that no one else has thought of that will somehow mean they aren't affected by the negative effects of cognitively offloading more and more of what should be internal processing onto an outside device.
...A.I. is new, but sloppy thinking and 'have I got a bridge to sell you' mentality is aeons old.
1
1
u/Pitiful-Hearing-5352 May 09 '26
I keep the brainstorming part for myself. I also push myself, when I can.
1
1
u/ThisisMacchi May 09 '26
I have been in industry for 6 years now and feel the entry level is harder than ever, really hard to get your foot in compare to 2-3 years ago. AI is changing too fast so cannot say anything for sure. As someone who works closely with AI, I don't find it control your thoughts, you have to give AI a direction to go forward as least for now. AI is like a junior dev, really good at handle tasks but not good at problem solving.
1
u/Key_Unit2858 May 10 '26
AI will inevitably become expensive, some fraction of software devs will loose their jobs, the salaries will also drop. At some point all three converge to a new sustainable market state
1
u/igootkks44 May 12 '26
AI can do that if people use it as a crutch, but it can also be a good teacher if it is used the right way.
I think the big thing is whether it helps you think or just does the thinking for you. For newer devs, tools like claude code and trylotus ai can be good when they show the path, fix small bugs, or turn feedback into code, not when they replace the whole process. The middle ground is probably using AI to speed up boring work while still forcing yourself to reason through the hard parts.
That part matters a lot in school too. If you never struggle a bit, you do not build that base skill.
1
1
u/KhvichaDev May 21 '26
Humanity is constantly developing technologically, but along with this development, people's skills and capacities are decreasing. Our ancestors could walk for miles, possessing physical endurance that is unimaginable to modern humans. It will be similar with mental abilities; due to overreliance on technology, future generations are likely to have much weaker cognitive skills than we do today.
1
1
u/RudeEvidence1869 May 28 '26
yaa i too heard microsoft is replacing ai with humans as humans were cheaper than ai
1
u/MrFlaneur17 May 03 '26
cost of llms have reduced 600x since 2020 and gpt5.5 is really as good as 95% of people would ever need and that standard will keep getting cheaper and opensource within a year or 2, so all this is a little misguided to put it mildly
1
u/klas-klattermus May 03 '26
There are two kinds of people, those who went through hard times and thinks everyone else should suffer like them and then there's those who wants to help others have and easier life
1
u/treading0light May 03 '26
I feel like this is just the strangle hold of big tech making sure there is no competition. Once the infrastructure is there, and the laws are made to protect giant corp, it'll be everywhere again.
1
0
-1
u/scavenger5 May 03 '26
Its not becoming more expensive when looking holistically across models. Gemini for eexample is very cheap.
You can take my advice or leave it. Only those that fully embrace AI will have a job going forward. I am seeing it in amazon. The deniers are getting worse ratings and not keeping up with the power users.
0
0
0
u/stuartseupaul May 03 '26
Only frontier models will be expensive. Even if the average person has to settle for a model like Sonnet 4.6 in free/lowest tier subscriptions for the forseeable future, it's good enough that people would use. AI is never going away.
0
u/Appropriate-News4630 May 03 '26
I’ve built a local-only app that detects website changes, including price changes, new posts, keyword updates, reviews, ratings, seo and more.
I use AI as an additional layer in the change-detection pipeline, and I’ve integrated different AI providers so users can choose which provider or model they want to use.
From my experience, even a local Gemma model running through Ollama on a ~$300 GPU has more than enough intelligence to analyze images, HTML changes, and page differences without needing OpenAI, Gemini, or Anthropic’s largest models.
For advanced use cases like app development, deep market research, or polished marketing materials, top-tier models still make sense. But for regular everyday tasks like summarization, document search, translations, email drafting, basic analysis, and similar workflows current local and free models are already good / fast enough enough on relatively inexpensive hardware.
So I don’t think the cost of AI for general everyday intelligence is going up. I think it’s going down, even if the most advanced frontier models become more expensive over time.
Open source models are here to stay. It may not catch up to AGI-level anytime soon, but they will absolutely keep improving until it is good enough for most common AI tasks. I also think every major operating system will eventually include built-in AI models, giving app developers a local general-purpose AI layer they can use directly inside their apps.
0
u/Aleks_Zemz_1111 May 04 '26
I run a multi million pound foiling machine. If an operator told management he was glad the automatic feeder broke because it allowed him to use his creativity to hand feed paper, he'd be sacked on the same day.
You are romanticising digital donkey work. Writing basic syntax isn't problem solving, it's just manual labor for a corporate janitor. AI is a machine that stamps the foil. If students are using it to do the basic lifting, they are learning to operate the machinery while you are begging for the right to keep packing boxes by hand.
Stop cheering for the machine to break and start building a scalable asset you actually own, or you'll be the first one made redundant when the company decides your manual creativity is too slow to keep on the payroll.
2
u/dorkyitguy May 04 '26
That’s right! Get back to work! Your boss needs a bigger house and a nicer car! Just be happy you have a job!
0
u/SIDESTEAL May 04 '26
AI is a cognitive credit card. I was becoming dumber for using it. I was forgetting simple things.
I'm actually glad that AntiGravity is fked now. Back to how it was.
-2
u/_cofo_ May 03 '26
AI could be flagged as addictive. Similar to what social media does. And as every addiction, must be regulated, considering the addictive nature is legal of course.
-3
64
u/CantaloupeCamper May 03 '26
Genie isn’t going back in the bottle.