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Comment by itsoktocry | Hacker News Reader

>This looks like it has all the makings of another WeWork, only this time with an epochal AI winter as the aftermath.

I'm as cynical as it gets on this forum, as evidenced by my comment history.

But you're comparing these AI companies to WeWork? Really?

WeWork was a real estate company operating in a historically favourable environment (0% interest rates) pretending to be a tech company. They literally rented office space. What do they have in common?

I notice there's a new generation of "grey beard" programmers constantly talking about how "useless" AI is for programming, and they can do everything faster. Meanwhile, there are tons of us out there who are paying $20, $30, $50 per month and upwards for these tool as they are, and wouldn't want to go without. Ever. And we have no idea where it's going to go. Maybe you're missing something?

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> Meanwhile, there are tons of us out there who are paying $20, $30, $50 per month and upwards for these tool as they are, and wouldn't want to go without.

I'm paying for Claude, which I find super helpful (although mostly for side-projecty stuff rather than dayjob). I'd definitely pay double what it costs today, particularly if I went back to shorter-term environments where I think it shines.

If you can't hook it up to your codebase/you write in a language where it's not great (it doesn't seem good at Elisp at all, at all) then I could see how people might not find the value.

Nonetheless, despite finding these tools useful, I too am sceptical about whether or not there's a valuable business there.

For context, I said this about Uber, WeWork and a bunch of other startups that never really monetised. Note that I also said that about Facebook, where I was completely wrong.

AI is a real threat to programming compensation. It's already kind of happening as junior dev work has become much harder to find (and consequently people will take jobs paying less), and senior devs are starting to lean on LLM's for basic code.

If you are paying attention, this is a pretty terrifying prospect if you are building a $200k+/yr life on the basis that SWE will pay like this forever. A machine is coming along that genuinely might be 80% of your skill set in a few years, makes it very difficult to negotiate generous packages with the remaining 20%.

> A machine is coming along that genuinely might be 80% of your skill set in a few years

Something similar happened when COBOL came out. Same with website builders. The big difference between most industries versus software is we aren't even close to satisfying the world's desire for software yet, so increases in productivity just gives us bigger leverage.

From a greybeard, I'll say this: This is nothing new. I don't see that this will disadvantage anybody other than those with a failure to adapt. This is about on par with IDEs that can stub out tests and method signatures on the scale of things to worry about.

> A machine is coming along that genuinely might be 80% of your skill set in a few years

Is this supposed to be scary? This scenario is absolute stonks if you're a developer worth your salt. A machine makes me 5 times more productive, and I don't even have to commoditize my complement because they're taking care of that themselves?

This assumes companies have finite backlogs. AI will raise productivity, but to date no company has said 'our software is done, send all the programmers home.' Instead companies expand what they want from their software.

The rate of change could make the short term bumpy as companies try to play around with less dev work. Eventually though competition will push companies to raise their productivity to the new baseline (programmers + AI).

One thing that is a danger is if devs ignore what's happening in AI. I remember when Google first came out having to learn the art of querying Google to get what I was looking for. AI/LLMs looks to be the same - ignore learning how to leverage them at your own peril.

> our software is done, send all the programmers home

That does happen. Obviously no programmers employed at those companies to talk about it on HN though.

This 100% does happen, all the time, mostly in SMB.

Hire a team to build a project, when it's finally satisfied most of your requirements, you progressively cut staff until only Jim is left, and Jim spends the next two decades maintaining the system, growing out his hair and beard, piling kludge on top of kludge, and drinking heavily until retirement.

The HN bubble, focused so intently on BigTech and FAANG, is woefully unaware of how things work basically everywhere else.

>'our software is done, send all the programmers home.'

Twitter

If only.

Pre-musk, links to random tweets seemed to load almost instantly. Now?

Last time I tried, took 48 seconds to show a "please login or create account" message.

My Performa 5200 in the 1990s booted up faster than that.

If he'd kept things as is, without fiddling, that would've been an improvement over what he actually did.

Still, I'm glad he reduced my compulsive use of the service.

According to Fidelity, Twitter has gone from a 44 billion dollar company to less than 10 in 2 years. Clearly we should not be using it as an example of how to run a technology business.

I think we're misidentifying AI as the catalyst when it's more like the accepted excuse for diminishing compensation for software developers. Ownership wanted to drive down costs as salaries were getting out of control. This includes not just wages but work/life balance and other perks.

Personally I think its cyclical as software is such a key component of communication and automation - and so we'll see future growth periods but probably not to the same extent as the last decade where seemingly every undergrad was compelled to study Computer Science.

I don’t think that software salaries are coming down yet as a result of Copilot/ChatGPT, they’ve come down because of overexpansion during COVID and a big rise in interest rates that makes raising funding and investment much more challenging for most technology companies and forces them to become profitable sooner rather than later (with some not able to make that transition and therefore failing).

Junior positions being hard to find are the result of the post Covid market correction and the relative expense of borrowing money in a high interest rate environment, not of chatbots replacing juniors. Executives might be saying it's AI but they're wrong.

(nodding my head in glum agreement to this comment)

These AI companies are playing the same game of selling $2 to earn $1.

AI is a polarising. And the danger with such things is once you’ve made up your mind, it’s hard to look at things from the other side regardless of whether you are for or against it. And arguments supporting either POV starts to look like shilling.

> AI is a polarising.

I'd rather argue that every hyped topic is polarizing, and your argument can be adjusted to basically every hugely hyped topic.

Maybe. Still means that most people will not be able to think rationally about it.

What they have in common is that they're selling a (now) commodity product for margins that will be driven further down over time as other companies catch up and the huge leaps stop happening. With WeWork it was other old-guard real-estate managers realizing they can do what WeWork does for cheaper.

Comparing to airlines was fine, but you take issue with a comparison to real-estate? WeWork was also beloved by their customers and had leadership who were a bit off the rails.

The fact that switching models is changing one string in AWS bedrock means that nobody is going to be able to charge a significant premium.

I'm genuinely curious what makes the current crop of tools so compelling/productive to you personally? Been doing this for twenty years so I guess I'm a greybeard.

I've always found the time-consuming part of this job to be understanding the context of the change rather than making the change itself. Essentially, trying to understand the existing code and business requirements and how they all fit together. I can definitely see the potential for AI to help make this easier but I haven't found the current tooling to be any good at this.

>But you're comparing these AI companies to WeWork? Really?

It's the first tool that came to hand: I'm sure there are better historical comparisons if I bothered to look. For professional reasons, I was well acquainted with WeWork when they were a big deal. It was clear to many of us in advance of their collapse that WeWork was heading for a hard crash based on their lease commitments and other public data. In this case, public data, such as for OpenAI and Anthropic, strongly suggests that, like WeWork, the economics of the businesses don't make sense. There are some fundamentals that no amount of innovation can overcome. Committing to leases you can't conceivably cover is one of them. Spending $2.35 for every $1 of revenue is clearly another, absent some breakthrough.

WeWork is not a perfect example. But if OpenAI flames out, it will be mentioned in the same breath as WeWork. The reasons are not the same, but they do sort of rhyme.

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