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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure that it has to be so zero sum. The AI truth is probably somewhere in the middle; it probably doesn't replace software engineers and it probably won't be deleted as completely useless. My current feeling is that it's a powerful tool I'm happy to pay to use; it doesn't replace me, but it makes it easier to do higher quality work. It feels a lot like IntelliSense, or faster compilers, or getting a 32" monitor. That probably doesn't sustain the bubble, but it's something that people are going to be poking at and making money off of for a long time.

I agree that people are investing as though the world is going to run itself while the ultra-wealthy run off in yachts to compare sizes. If it wasn't AI, it would just be tulips or something. That's just how people are. But maybe they'll be right, who knows.

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> The AI truth is probably somewhere in the middle; it probably doesn't replace software engineers and it probably won't be deleted as completely useless.

This is not really somewhere in the middle, I think. It is very close to one of the ends. Because the fear-promise to the idiot-investor class was that it would have those impacts across all industries, not just us nerds. They hate us for refusing to make their silly ideas possible and having irritating fact-based reasons why they can't work, but they don't hate us enough to spend that much money replacing just us. They have lots of other people they hate paying too, and we haven't even made a dent.

LLMs are genuinely useful tools if used as such and not some magic people replacer.

I do wonder if their provided utility will still justify the cost once the bubble pops and frontier models aren't subsidized money furnaces, though.

Yup, a nice tool.

I think we can learn from history about where this is headed. I remember when each developer needed a $600 compiler to write C++. Eventually that industry was replaced by free compilers. Kind of a similar thing going on with frontier models; I really like Fable 5, but if I didn't have any money I'd use GLM 5.2 or something. Since my employer does have money to spend on it, I enjoy the productivity boost (just like Intel's C++ compiler produced faster code than gcc for a while), but you can see the direction things are going. Eventually the moat around Anthropic and OpenAI collapses, and AI coding assistance is something built into every text editor.

There is still probably a lot of upside on betting that some lab produces a model that is light years ahead of what we have today. But I feel less "I'd better start planning for a new career" than I did a year ago.

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