> The cost of turning written business logic into code has dropped to zero
Didn’t realize this was science fiction.
Didn’t realize this was science fiction.
I've seen non-technical people vibe code with agents. They're capable of producing janky, very basic CRUD apps. Code cost definitely ain't zero
Compared to my salary, the current cost of the models and tokens to do the work I normally would, is around 10%-25% of it.
Obviously, you still need someone to prevent the models from going insane and messing everything up, but in my experience (webdev projects, DevOps stuff, local software, well known domains), it is very much a force multiplier, as long as you acknowledge that you really need tests and various prebuild scripts.
So I predict one of two things happening:
A) de-valuation of software development work in well-explored domains (and perhaps some changes in regards to outsourcing, as long as cultural and communication differences can be compensated for); with the implications for those learning programming now
B) the squeeze coming in the other direction, making inference 3-5x more expensive, though maybe not with how every big org out there is trying to be a loss leader
And how much is technical debt worth?
They never refuse. Worst case scenario the good models ask for clarification.
The cost for producing code is zero and code producers are in a really bad spot.
Agents are monitoring metrics and logs. A bug is introduced into the system. Error rates go up and the agents notify diagnostic agents. These agents look at recent commits and figure out the problem. They instruct another agent about how to fix the issue and deploy the change. The problem is fixed before an engineer even has time to start looking at logs.
If you aren’t seeing this, you’re not keeping up with what others are already doing. It’s not just people vibe coding ToDo apps.
One could argue we could achieve the same goals by appending \n to a file in a loop, but this is inefficient nowadays with generous token offerings (but could change in the future than I highly suggest just outputting \n to a file an call it productivity increase)
I didn't understand your point about product owners. Who the fuck would ever need one when code produces itself?
Zero as long as your time is worth nothing, and bad code and security issues cost you nothing maybe.
"Getting code" has always been dead simple and cheap. Getting actually good code that works and doesn't turn into a problem for you down the road is the expensive part
i can't remember who said it but a long time ago i remember reading "Linux is free if your time is worthless". Now we all use Linux one way or the other.
Maybe one day LLMs will eventually make good code at a low cost, and that will allow non-programmers to write programs with few problems but the cost will never be zero, and I think we're a long long way from making human programers obsolete.
All of the intelligence that LLMs mimic came directly from the work of human minds which got fed into them, but what LLMs output is a lossy conversion filled with error and hallucination.
My guess is that the LLMs producing code will improve for a short time, but as they start to slurp up more and more of their own slop they'll start performing worse.