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Comment by fendy3002 | Hacker News Reader

> It is just stupidly cheaper; for the price of one junior you can do so many api requests to claude it's not even funny

Idk if the cheap price is really cheap price or promotion price, where after that the enshittification and price increase happen, which is a trend for most tech companies.

And agree, llm will weed bad programmers further, though in the future, bad alternatives (like analyst or bad llm users) may emerge

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"For the price of a cab you can take so many ubers it's not even funny". Yeah, until the price dumping stops and workers demand better conditions and you start comparing apples to apples.

Why do you have bad programmers on staff? Let them go, LLMs existing or not.

Bad programmers aren't black and white situation, there's so many range of programmers quality out there, with different sector too (analysis, programming, db design, debugging, etc). And as the standard, companies need to adjust cost and requirement, while those are affected by supply and demand too. Moreover, common people cannot measure programmers quality as easy, and bad programmers have delayed effect too. So it's not as simple as not hire bad programmers.

LLM however, will change the playing field. Let's say that bottom 20 or 30% of programmers will be replaced by LLM in form of increased performance by the other 70%.

> Moreover, common people cannot measure programmers quality as easy

So you can't fire the bad apples because you don't know who they are, but you feel confident that you can pick out whom to replace by an LLM and then fire?

It's hopefully obvious to everybody that this is a hopelessly naïve take on things and is never going to play out that way.

People hire teams from some countries because they are cheap and they are terrible. LLMs are not good but better than many of these and cheaper. It's not really changing much in code quality or process, just a lot cheaper.

Companies like that deserve to die out since the quality they bring to the market is horrendous either way.

I agree with all remarks you made; but how old are you? As it all seems pretty naive? The world unfortunately is only about money and nothing else, it is terrible but it is. Better worlds are eradicated by this reality all the time.

It is by far most companies. But yes, I agree.

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