But there's open models that are (pessimistically) 1 year behind? It's not like if openai decided to rugpull everyone, we'd be going back to writing code by hand and all the developers who forgot how to fizzbuzz would be screwed.
Open models still need compute.
Open AI rents compute. It seems unlikely given the huge investments they have already spent that they can profitably match someone who is just selling GPU time.
Open weight models are way closer to frontiers than that
> we'd be going back to writing code by hand
Well, as as SWE who writes code by hand and has no intention to outsource their intelligence to any entity, I felt slightly offended by "back".
Are you a member of a team? Then you are the outsourced intelligence. Your manager is not writing everything by hand, they are outsourcing it to you. Just understand that may change (I mean I am already mentally prepared for it to be a thing of the past within years). If you are purely writing software for hobby/fun then disregard, nothing will stop you from doing that.
I have no problem with other people outsourcing their intelligence to me, I've been doing this for years. But I prefer not to outsource my intelligence, at least not for things I care about, for various reasons.
Do you use an operating system? What about databases? Or the myriad of other software used which we build upon. I can't imagine a professional coding context where we don't outsource intelligence to some degree, if not a major degree. We stand on the shoulders of giants as they say.
It's not a problem at all. It's only for the things I care about and I consider important for a couple of reasons (maintaining and developing mental models etc.).
An open model is not your brain.
There's an escape valve: I've had Claude stand-up AI-enabled features in my app, so we're much less dependent on Claude itself. The app uses cheap API calls to check code quality and run other "lessons learned" sweeps. Some of these become regular code in the end as well.
Same. Claude "loves" writing tools to make checks deterministic so much that I actually have to pull it back sometimes and point out that some things need to keep using LLMs. But even then, I have it "farm out" a lot of things to scripts using dirt-cheap models for things I don't need a Sonnet or higher level model for as well. The proportion that runs on the SOTA models keeps dropping.