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Correct code is not cheap. And some places you need a very correct code. Like in mission critical systems.

The fundamentals of writing correct code have become dramatically cheaper by orders of magnitude. I have been involved in hiring dozens of developers. Fable/Opus 5.5 would be a superior drop-in replacement for perhaps 75% of those hires at roughly 1/100 the cost.

Perhaps for writing boilerplate, or generic websites from scratch, or early stage prototypes.

I work in embedded systems where it's harder to offload the burden of testing and maintenance. Systems knowledge is important: experienced developers can be costly to replace.

LLMs make a lot of things easier, but costs have certainly not fallen by 2 orders of magnitude.

How many people on HN work on mission critical systems? The discussion is not currently constrained to that. I agree, but the exception proves the rule.

Define "mission critical" and then maybe we can come up with a reasonable estimate.

Defined as "people die if your code has a mistake".

And even in these systems AI will be better than humans at finding issues.

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