Yes, I have written code I could not have without the model. To me, 200$ is cheap. It's better than claude 3.5 by a wide margin if you know how to prompt for coding.
Slowdown? Sonnet 3.5 came out in June, and was a step change in programming capability. Zoom out 5 years and we are moving at lightning pace. This is like saying bitcoin isnt ripping because it went down for six months. Non linear progress doesn't monotonically increase
Computer programming is easily verifiable, the code works or it doesnt. so you dont need good english, and your education doesnt really matter since either you write working code or you dont. its also a massive cost on businesses. theres like a thousand reasons
JetBrains has gone downhill since they purged their original developers. The IDE is not as performant, and newer versions are full of bugs. I have heard this first hand from people in Russia. Cursor.sh and ai development tools are a huge threat to the company, and are far outside their core competency. Decent chance they cannot keep up with innovation, and their hyper tuned IDEs become obsolete.
VCs more often than not just pick who they want to run a company in some vertical. So like, an AI company for lawyers, they just go find some Harvard guy and fund him. It increases wealth inequality, bc they choose who to write the check to. Hard charging entrepreneurs from underdog backgrounds do get funded, but its way harder for them, many hurdles to clear.
Before you quit, whatever idea you want to build, try to sell it. Go make a landing page, sign up on apollo.io, start sending sales emails. Offer to pay people 100$ per hour to speak with you. If you get sales with no tech, then maybe quit and build.
"Labor shortage", except real wages in the usa have been declining since the 1970s. People need to be shamed for using these terms. Inflation adjusted, and even worse, real estate adjusted, wages have dropped like a rock.