Tokens are expensive. We don't know what the actual cost is yet. We have startups, who aren't turning a profit, buying up all the capacity of the supply chain. There are so many impacts here that we don't have the data on.
Code is still liability but it's undeniable that going from thought to running code is very cheap today.
To recap, the author disagrees that writing code is cheap, because we've collectively invested trillions of dollars and redirected entire supply chains into automating code generation. The externalities will be paid for generations to come by all of humanity; it's just not reflected in your Claude subscription.
The cat is out of the bag: compute shall keep getting cheaper as it's always been since 60 years or something.
It's always been maintenance that's been the killer and GP is totally right about that.
And if we look at a company like Cloudflare who basically didn't have any serious outage for five years then had five serious outages in six months since they drank the AI kool-aid, we kinda have a first data point on how amazing AI is from a maintenance point of view.
We all know we're generating more lines of underperforming, insecure, probably buggy, code than ever before.
We're in for a wild ride.
past success is not a strong indicator for future success.
We kind of do? Local models (thought no state of the art) set a floor on this.
Even if prices are subsidized now (they are) that doesn't mean they will be more expensive later. e.g. if there's some bubble deflation then hardware, electricity, and talent could all get cheaper.