Comment by lowsong | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lowsong | Hacker News Reader

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> What you're missing is that fewer and fewer projects are going to need a ton of technical depth. > I have friends who'd never written a line of code in their lives who now use multiple simple vibe-coded apps at work daily.

Again it's the opposite. A landscape of vibe coded micro apps is a landscape of buggy, vulnerable, points of failure. When you buy a product, software or hardware, you do more than buy the functionality you buy the assurance it will work. AI does not change this. Vibe code an app to automate your lightbulbs all you like, but nobody is going to be paying millions of dollars a year on vibe coded slop apps and apps like that is what keeps the tech industry afloat.

> Humanity is not going to stop pouring more and more money into AI.

There's no more money to pour into it. Even if you did, we're out of GPU capacity and we're running low on the power and infrastructure to run these giant data centres, and it takes decades to bring new fabs or power plants online. It is physically impossible to continue this level of growth in AI investment. Every company that's invested into AI has done so on the promise of increased improvement, but the moment that stops being true everything shifts.

> The AI bubble isn't going to pop. This is like saying the internet bubble is going to pop in 1999.

The internet bubble did pop. What happened after is an assessment of how much the tech is actually worth, and the future we have now 26 years later bears little resemblance to the hype in 1999. What makes you think this will be different?

Once the hype fades, the long-term unsuitability for large projects becomes obvious, and token costs increase by ten or one hundred times, are businesses really going to pay thousands of dollars a month on agent subscriptions to vibe code little apps here and there?

> Again it's the opposite. A landscape of vibe coded micro apps is a landscape of buggy, vulnerable, points of failure. When you buy a product, software or hardware, you do more than buy the functionality you buy the assurance it will work. AI does not change this. Vibe code an app to automate your lightbulbs all you like, but nobody is going to be paying millions of dollars a year on vibe coded slop apps and apps like that is what keeps the tech industry afloat.

This is what everyone says when technology democratizes something that was previously reserved for a small number of experts.

When the printing press was invented, scribes complained that it would lead to a flood of poorly written, untrustworthy information. And you know what? It did. And nobody cares.

When the web was new, the news media complained about the same thing. A landscape of poorly researched error-ridden microblogs with spelling mistakes and inaccurate information. And you know what? They were right. That's exactly what the internet led to. And now that's the world we live in, and 90% of those news media companies are dead or irrelevant.

And here you are continuing the tradition of discussing a new landscape of buggy, vulnerable products. And the same thing will happen and already is happening. People don't care. When you democratize technology and you give people the ability to do something useful they never could do before without having to spend years becoming an expert, they do it en masse, and they accept the tradeoffs. This has happened time and time again.

> The internet bubble did pop... the future we have now 26 years later bears little resemblance to the hype in 1999. What makes you think this will be different?

You cut out the part where I said it only popped economically, but the technology continued to improve. And the situation we have now is even better than the hype in 1999:

They predicted video on demand over the internet. They predicted the expansion of broadband. They predicted the dominance of e-commerce. They predicted incumbents being disrupted. All of this happened. Look at the most valuable companies on earth right now.

If anything, their predictions were understated. They didn't predict mobile, or social media. They thought that people would never trust SaaS because it's insecure. They didn't predict Netflix dominating Hollywood. The internet ate MORE than they thought it would.

> This is what everyone says when technology democratizes something that was previously reserved for a small number of experts.

What part of renting your ability to do your job is "democratizing"? The current state of AI is the literal opposite. Same for local models that require thousands of dollars of GPUs to run.

Over the past 20 years software engineering has become something that just about anyone can do with little more than a shitty laptop, the time and effort, and an internet connection. How is a world where that ability is rented out to only those that can pay "democratic"?

> When the printing press was invented, scribes complained that it would lead to a flood of poorly written, untrustworthy information. And you know what? It did. And nobody cares.

A bad book is just a bad book. If a novel is $10 at the airport and it's complete garbage then I'm out $10 and a couple of hours. As you say, who cares. A bad vibe coded app and you've leaked your email inbox and bank account and you're out way more than $10. The risk profile from AI is way higher.

Same is even more true for businesses. The cost of a cyberattack or a outage is measured in the millions of dollars. It's a simple maths, the cost of the risk of compromise far oughtweights the cost of cheaper upfront software.

> You cut out the part where I said it only popped economically, but the technology continued to improve.

The improvement in AI models requires billions of dollars a year in hardware, infrastructure, end energy. Do you think that investors will continue to pour that level of investment into improving AI models for a payout that might only come ten to fifteen years down the road? Once the economic bubble pops, the models we have are the end of the road.

"Thousands of dollars of GPU" as a one-time expense (not ongoing token spend) is dirt cheap if it meaningfully improves productivity for a dev. And your shitty laptop can probably run local AI that's good enough for Q&A chat.

On a SWE salary maybe. If the baseline cost of doing business is a $5k GPU you've excluded like a quarter of the US working population immediately.

> What part of renting your ability to do your job is "democratizing"? The current state of AI is the literal opposite. Same for local models that require thousands of dollars of GPUs to run.

"Renting your ability to do your job"?

I think you're misunderstanding the definition of democratization. This has nothing to do with programmers. It has nothing to do with people's jobs. Democratizing is defined as "the process of making technology, information, or power accessible, available, or appealing to everyone, rather than just experts or elites."

In other words, democratizing is not about people who who have jobs as programmers. It's about the people who don't know how to code, who are not software engineers, who are suddenly gaining the ability to produce software.

Three years ago, you could not pay money to produce software yourself. You either had to learn and develop expertise yourself, or hire someone else. Today, any random person can sit down and build a custom to-do list app for herself, for free, almost instantly, with no experience.

> The improvement in AI models requires billions of dollars a year in hardware, infrastructure, end energy. Do you think that investors will continue to pour that level of investment into improving AI models for a payout that might only come ten to fifteen years down the road? Once the economic bubble pops, the models we have are the end of the road.

10-15 year payouts? Uhhh. Maybe you don't know any AI investors, but the payout is coming NOW. Many tens of thousands of already gotten insanely rich, three years ago, and two years ago, and last year, and this year. If you think investors won't be motivated, and there aren't people currently in line to throw their money into the ring, you're extremely uninformed about investor sentiment and returns lol.

You can predict that the music will stop. That's fair. But to say that investors are worried about long payout times is factually inaccurate. The money is coming in faster and harder than ever.

I have no idea what this flood of personal-use software is that you think normal people want to produce. Normal people don't even think about software doing a thing until they see an advertisement about software that does a thing. And then they'd rather pay 10 bucks for it than to invent a shittier version of it themselves for $500.

And I'm not being condescending about normal people. Developers often don't think about the possibility of making software that does a particular thing until they actually see software that does that thing. And they're going to also going to prefer to buy than vibe code unless the program is small and insignificant.

Go look at the numbers from Lovable and Replit and Claude Code and similar companies. Quite staggering.

I myself have run an online community for early-stage startup founders for over a decade. The number of ambitious people who would love to build something but don't know how to code and in the last year or two have started cranking out applications is tremendous. That number is far higher than the number of software engineers who existed before.

That's very much an echo chamber you find yourself in. I'm far away from any technological center and the main use of LLM for people is the web search widget, spell checking and generating letters. Also kids cheating on their homework.

> Democratizing is defined as "the process of making technology, information, or power accessible, available, or appealing to everyone, rather than just experts or elites."

Your definition only supports my point. The transfer of skill from something you learn to something you pay to do is the exact and complete opposite of your stated definition. It turns the activity from something that requires you to learn it to one that only those that can afford to pay can do.

It is quite literally making this technology, information, and power available to only the elite.

> Uhhh. Maybe you don't know any AI investors, but the payout is coming NOW.

What payout? Zero AI companies are profitable. If you're invested in one of these companies you could be a billionaire on paper, but until it's liquid it's meaningless. There's plenty of investors who stand to make a lot of money if these big companies exit, but there's no guarantee that will happen.

The only people making money at the moment are either taking cash salaries from AI labs or speculating on Nvidia stock. Neither of which have much do with the tech itself and everything to do with the hype.

> It is quite literally making this technology, information, and power available to only the elite.

I don't know what to say to you. More people are coding now with AI than ever coded before. If your argument was true, then that would just mean that there are more elites than ever. Obviously that's not what's happening.

> What payout? Zero AI companies are profitable.

Because they're reinvesting profits into continued R&D, not because their current products are unprofitable. You're failing to understand basic high-growth business models.

> If you're invested in one of these companies you could be a billionaire on paper, but until it's liquid it's meaningless.

Plenty of AI companies have exited, and plenty of other AI companies offer tender offers where shareholders have been able to sell their shares to new investors. Again, it sounds like you just aren't really educated on what's happening. Plenty of people are millionaires in real life, not just on paper. You're massively incorrect about the payout landscape that investors are considering.

> The only people making money at the moment are either taking cash salaries from AI labs or speculating on Nvidia stock.

No, founders, early-stage investors, and employees with stock have cashed out in many cases. Again, it just feels like you're not aware of what's happening on the ground.

> Neither of which have much do with the tech itself and everything to do with the hype.

That's a very different argument. If you want to say that the investment is unsound, then fine, that's your opinion, but trying to say that investors have no appetite because they have to wait 10 to 15 years for a payout is incredibly incorrect.

> I don't know what to say to you. More people are coding now with AI than ever coded before. If your argument was true, then that would just mean that there are more elites than ever. Obviously that's not what's happening.

I don't know how I can explain this any more clearly.

If you need AI to create software, and the cost of AI is $200/month, then only people who can afford $200/month can create software.

Costs will increase. The current cost is substituted by investor funding. Sell at a loss to get people hooked on the product and then raise the price to make money, a "high-growth business model" as you say.

The cost to make a competitor to Anthropic or OpenAI is tens or hundreds of billions of dollars upfront. There will be few competitors and minimal market pressure to reduce prices, even if the unit costs of inference are low.

$200/month is already out of reach of the majority of the population. Increases from here means only a small percentage of the richest people can afford it.

I don't know what definition of "elite" you're using but, "technology limited so that only a small percentage of the population can afford it" is... an elite group.

This is fun and all, but I think we've reached the end of the productive discussion to be had and I don't have much more to say. Charitably, we're leaving in completely different realities. I just hope when the bubble pops the fall isn't too hard for you.

> I don't know how I can explain this any more clearly. If you need AI to create software, and the cost of AI is $200/month, then only people who can afford $200/month can create software.

Your entire hypothetical is based on "ifs" that aren't true. Nothing in this sentence is true. You don't need AI to create software, the cost of AI development is much less than $200/month on average, and many more people can afford AI dev than programming bootcamps or classes or degrees.

> Costs will increase. The current cost is substituted by investor funding. Sell at a loss to get people hooked on the product and then raise the price to make money, a "high-growth business model" as you say.

Inference is already profitable at current pricing. Most funding goes toward R&D for new model training, not inference.

Also, inference costs dropped over 280x between Nov 2022 and Oct 2024. Inference will continue to get cheaper as we develop more specialized hardware and efficient models.

This is not Uber, subsidizing the cost of human drivers. This is real tech, chips and servers and software. Costs fall over time, not rise. Innovation does not go backwards.

> $200/month is already out of reach of the majority of the population. Increases from here means only a small percentage of the richest people can afford it.

This is an absurd claim. There are many things the majority of the population spends money on that cost more than this.

I'm going to take your comment at face value, and I'm also going to assume that you're US-based.

You need to take a step back and look at the economic reality of the majority of Americans today. Many live paycheck-to-paycheck, even those with "middle class" incomes. For many a $200 one-off bill is debilitating, yet alone a recurring subscription. If you don't know that, you have a dangerously narrow view of the economy.

If you think that a $200/month subscription is "out of reach" for the majority of Americans, you are just plainly and simply wrong about that. They might have to make some tradeoffs by reducing spending in other areas, but that's part of life.

> $200/month is already out of reach of the majority of the population.

1. You can build small applications with the $20/month sub, much more with the $100/month. Competition and technology improvements will inevitably improve the price to value ratio.

2. Cable sports subscriptions are in a similar price range. Expensive, but not exclusive to “the elites”.

The median per capita income in the United States is $37,683/year.[0] Depending on your state, after taxes, that's something like ~$2,600/month. You're asking almost 10% of their post-tax income to this just for the opportunity to create software. With rent, food, and other living expenses many households at that income level simply cannot afford this.

This is the median income. If it's a struggle for someone on this income then it's worse for half of all Americans, and American incomes are higher than most of the rest of the world.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_personal_income_in_...

The bar for "create software" up to this last year or so was "learn software development" or "pay someone else".

Personally, I think millions more people having the ability to create some subset of software is an incredible shift.

Dont waste your time on him. He reminds me of people who are so concentrated on one part of the picture, they can't see the whole damn thing and how all the pieces fit and interact with each other.

You're describing yourself imo. Your point ignores hundreds of years of history and says zero about the forces that shape technological development and progress, which have been studied fairly exhaustively.

Your whole argument is based on 'the technology improves'.

Ok, so another fundamental proposition is monetary resources are needed to fund said technology improvement.

Whats wrong with LLMs? They require immense monetary resources.

Is that a problem for now? No because lots of private money is flowing in and Google et al have the blessing of their shareholders to pump up the amount of cash flows going into LLM based projects.

Could all this stop? Absolutely, many are already fearing the returns will not come. What happens then? No more huge technology leaps.

This has literally never happened in the history of humanity. Name one technology where development permanently stopped due to lack of funding, despite there being...

1. lots of room for progress, i.e. the theoretical ceiling dwarfed the current capabilities

2. strong incentives to continue development, i.e. monetary or military success

3. no obviously better competitors/alternatives

4. social/cultural tolerance from the public

Literally hasn't happened. Even if you can find 1 or 2 examples, they are dwarfed by the hundreds of counter examples. But more than likely, you won't find any examples, or you'll just find something recent where progress is ongoing.

Useful technology with room to improve almost always improves, as people find ways to make it better and cheaper. AI costs have already fallen dramatically since LLMs first burst on the scene a few years back, yet demand is higher than ever, as consumers and businesses are willing to pay top dollar for smarter and better models.

AI has none of these things.

1. As I said before, we've long since reached diminishing returns on models. We simply don't have enough compute or training data left to make them dramatically better.

2. This is only true if it actually pans out, which is still an unknown question.

3. Just... not using it? It has to justify its existence. If it's not of benefit vs. the cost then why bother.

4. The public hates AI. The proliferation of "AI slop" makes people despise the technology wholesale.

1. Saying that AI will never approach its theoretical limits because XYZ tech is approaching diminishing returns, is like saying guns would never get better than the fire sticks of China in 1000 AD because the then-current methods hit their theoretical limits. You're betting against tens of thousands of the smartest minds of a generation across the entire planet. I will happily take the other side of this bet.

2. Sure, depends on #1. But the incentive is undeniable.

3. It has. Do you think people are using Claude Code in incredible numbers for no reason?

4. The public and businesses are adopting AI en masse. It's incredibly useful. Demand is skyrocketing. I don't think you could show that negative public sentiment has been sufficient to stop this, any more than negative sentiment about TVs, headphones, bicycles, etc (which was significant).

With the exception of #1, I feel like you're arguing that things won't happen, where the numbers show they've already have happened and are accelerating.

Thanks for jumping in fella. Agree on all points.

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