People need to knock over pins in the bowling lane. SWE's are the pro bowlers who can (usually) throw pretty cleans shots to knock over pins. Now bumpers have been invented (LLMs) and regular folks who only have the faintest idea of how to roll a ball are knocking over pins. To the pro's these bumpers are all manner of bad and useless. To the laymen, they are an absolute revolution.
I can tell you, with a straight face, the my (non-tech) company has already forgone hiring a pro bowler in at least four instances now because of these bumpers. Just last week we skipped on a $1k/mo CAD SaaS because Claude was able to build the needed narrow-scope tooling in 10 minutes.
I'm sure a pro could come in and make that python program 3x as fast and use 60% less memory. But the fact of the matter is that we paid Anthropic $20, and spent 10 minutes to get a working niche manufacturing file interpreter/editor/converter.
LLM's are finally bridging the language barrier between computers and humans. Right now the tech exists to make this even more widespread, it's just a matter of time before someone creates a tech-illiterate IDE that users can paste AI generated code into and functioning programs come out the other side. No need to ever even see a terminal or command line. I wouldn't be surprised if this isn't already in the works.
"Hey Google, create an app that allows me to take a picture of a house plant, and then allows me to verbally make entries into a diary about that plant" Sure thing! Give me 3 minutes and the app will be on your homescreen and shareable .apk in your documents folder! I'll also cancel the $9.99/mo app that does the same thing for you. (ok probably not this part but you get the idea.)
The problem isn't that a "pro bowler" could come in and do something irrelevant for more money. Professional programmers understand that you shouldn't prematurely optimize things like memory or performance in contexts where that doesn't matter. You're ignoring the most important metric which is correctness. When we write a program, we make it correct then we can optimize it if that's actually important.
What's going to happen when you have your non-expert write a program using these tools and it inevitably gets something wrong? Are you prepared to build business process on top of a program whose author can't tell you how it works which might contain bugs? Do you even realize that this is just a recipe for producing mountains and mountains of technical debt?
You seem to believe this is going to put programmers out of a job but you're just explaining why they'll need even more of us in the future when these piles of garbage inevitably cost the company money.
How much more productive do you think claude makes you as compared to Google or Stack Overflow? 15%? 50%? 200? Do you think that's enough to satisfy the market or are we all trading on unrealistic expectations? Do you think shareholders are going to like it that they're losing billions a quarter so Anthropic can run a service that helps you write web dev projects marginally faster? Do you even understand the amount of value that's tied up in these questions having a good answer right now?
- Internet bubble 2001, - Blockchain bubble 2021, - AI bubble 2025,
(Omitting 2008 and Covid because they’re not startup-related).
Am I wrong or are they bubbling faster?
Pops are less noticeable when a lot of money is sloshing around so deflating one bubble immediately start inflating something else. Worker bees can switch to the next thing in the same "building next great thing, work is plentiful, money no object" environment.
So the bubbliness, IMO, is a function of the macroeconomic state, specifically the amount of money in the economy. Things get sober (and very ugly) when the money printing cycle ends, as it eventually must to avoid sliding into hyperinflation. My 2c.
I do actually use claude quite a bit recently and I suspect (completely anecdotal, so take it with a boatload of salt) it speeds up my development time by about 25% on average. But its a very lumpy sort of speed up that is sometimes a slow down depending upon how wacky the LLM's answers are. And I find claude 3.7 to be worse than claude 3.5 in many ways which makes me confused about how hyped up it is and further disillusioned about the "common sense" idea people around these parts have that the technology is just going to keep improving significantly year over year.
I use it entirely through the web interface and using the lowest price basic monthly subscription fee. I am probably a cost center for Anthropic rather than a profit center, but I don't really see that as my problem to worry about. I'll enjoy the thing while it lasts and then not cry too hard when the house of cards collapses.
I feel like I'm living in an insane asylum but your experience largely matches mine, except I've been reluctant to open my wallet
Seeing more and more of this now, where even in "these parts" anything short of "AGI IS HERE" even a few months ago would have you labelled as "Luddite" "skeptic" and "left behind".
When is the general public going to start asking questions? It's really not a game--people's 401ks have been propped up by the "Magnificent Seven" (disproportionately by one company) for some time now.
What happens "if" these proclamations fail to manifest? How is this all supposed to work out?
And I totally agree people should forget about the s&p 500 returns we've seen in the last 15 years going forward, it would probably be less (though I have no crystal ball, but regression to the mean seems likely).
I can make the same case for Meta, Microsoft, to lesser extent Amazon. I'll leave Tesla aside it's indeed too richly valued.
Also a business paying $1M/year in cloud bill is neither poor nor tiny. We have very different definition of tiny and poor.
Meta is very well suited in this AI race and will prevail well. Others will cut some loss and throw some ashes sometime soon.
I have no analogy for this except the railroads of the Gilded Age. Did railroads become a pretty big deal? Yeah. They were also a giant vortex that slurped up endless investment, far more than the real demand could possibly justify. And it ends, well, we know how it ends.
But it just won't be, nothing in our lifetime will ever come close to what the Internet boom was. The window for becoming a Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg as easily as they did is closed now, and you just need to live with it. The title of this chapter till the end of our days will remain "After the Internet Boom" and it will chronicle this pathetic desperation.
Yes
> the growth of the technology industry
That's an overblown claim. AI companies failing won't mean technology doesn't advance nor that companies betting against/independently from AI would recind.
> the entire US stock market
Probably yes
> the global economy
Probably no