I think the ideas worth pursuing still require substantial time and motivation, even with LLMs. Otherwise you just end up with a half-baked sloppy artifact that nobody will ever use or study, for a net negative benefit to humanity.
Here's an example: my office has a few cars for employees to use as rentals. The number is small enough that it would never be worth any serious software dev to build a tool to manage, but large enough that its a moderate amount of work for someone to manage the requests/getting supervisor approvals/schedule changes due to breakdowns.
AI one-shot that guy a tool. Its now dead simple, he's got a calendar, automatic emails going to people's supervisors with click-here-to-approve links, rescheduling options, fleet management. It doesn't even look bad.
Who cares if its using some un-backed-up sqlite database in the backend, has some placeholder tab for a feature he changed his mind about, or violates the DRY principles a bunch or uses some inferior authentication mechanism. Its an in house tool, isn't mission critical, and it makes his life significantly easier.
Basically everyone is now a few prompts away from their own bespoke tools, and only they will be able to judge the benefit thereof.
Edit: to tie this more directly to the article, I would argue that this is an example of "infinity-x" coding, because the user was in fact not capable of coding a solution on their own without AI.
In my business, I haven't found much area to use code. It's a pub, and we've long been low-tech. Cash register, no POS. I have a little code surrounding my own processes, but mostly it's manual. Hand-entering numbers in my spreadsheet, etc.
But what's interesting to me is that now I can probably program an esp32, or create a small mobile app for a mounted android tablet. I was a web dev in the past, and programming hardware was outside my skillset without dedicating some serious time to learning. Mobile I just always avoided--mostly the same reason.
Anyway, I've got some CYDs on my desk, we'll see what I can make with 'em. I want a kitchen ticketing system instead of the old hand-written ticket stubs, for starters.
However, without an agent running its own experiments on a cloud GPU, would I realistically have invested my limited work hours and tried evaluating 10 different models, each with 10 different tuned parameters, to solve my specific use case?
Or would I have tried 1-2 models and spent my time trying to optimize those models?
I think there is some merit to the spray and pray approach when one is in the exploration phase of the solution space.
Also, on more than one occasion now, I have had fable halve the inference latency of a model simply because the original implementation from an academic included unnecessary GPU-to-CPU-to-GPU transfers or similarly inefficient operations. Those optimizations came at essentially 0 time cost to me and I can verify that the outputs are byte-identical. Pretty sweet!
E.g. software that generates these models that I can print
https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-06-30/Modeling_a_W...
https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-12-01/Grounding_Yo...
Or blog post authoring software
https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-04-25/The_rise_of_...
There were so many things that no one will ever study and won’t give humanity any benefit but I use everyday to make my life better. That’s enough. The value far exceeds $200/mo. I’m getting it for cheap and now that I have my GPUs and my models they can’t even take it from me in the future if they wanted, haha!
LLMs allow for human flourishing on a massive scale. One of the best inventions to occur in my life. Up there with the Internet/Web. Truly a marvelous time.
Agreed. I haven’t been this excited by computers since I got broadband DSL in 1998.