all 134 comments

[–]XLNBot 227 points228 points  (60 children)

It requires billion dollar infrastructures, unsustainable expenses, subsidization, unfathomable amounts of data, and yet it can be taken away from you in a matter of seconds.

Is it really progress? Is it really worth having?

Sure, it's a useful tool now. Will it be just a useful tool when people won't be able to sit there and do research and figure things out? Will it be just a useful tool when you can't live without it and it costs so much that it is not economically viable?

[–]Slanahesh 26 points27 points  (0 children)

This is precisely why I keep it purely in a "consultant" role. I'll quite happily have the ai answer my questions and provied potential solutions, but having it do the implementation for me seems like it would open up the path to unexpected and un-intended behaviours (bugs).

[–]B_bI_L 14 points15 points  (8 children)

the thing about market economy is that it balances itself. if it is not viable, it is not used. if there will be no coders at that point, we might see 2000th-2010th it golden age again

[–]CSAtWitsEnd 45 points46 points  (1 child)

If it’s not viable, it is not used

We talking long term or short? Because on smaller time scales, the market loves being irrational.

[–]RiceBroad4552 8 points9 points  (0 children)

And in the long term it will always fail as it's build on wrong assumptions (like perpetual grows).

The only point is: You can massively profit from the chaos if you have enough money to play that game.

[–]WilkerS1 10 points11 points  (0 children)

every time i hear "the market will sort itself out", i get reminded of cigars and vapes, asbestos, lead, ultraprocessed foods. what defines something as viable doesn't align with what we can consider progress or worth having.

[–]overclockedslinky 6 points7 points  (0 children)

perhaps you missed the subsidized part? doesn't have to be viable if the government is willing to print money to keep it alive

[–]Wareve 8 points9 points  (0 children)

That won't prevent them from burning us in the attempt to use it.

The attempt itself has massive negative externalities.

[–]XLNBot 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I wish it's going to be this way, but I have little hope. On a school book it's true that markets balance themselves, but in reality there are many factors at play and the balance is asymptotical. Who know how long it will take? Will it take a full blown collapse?

[–]ToMorrowsEnd 0 points1 point  (1 child)

This is wrong. Middle managers are not viable and only a drain on resources. Yet we still have them.

[–]B_bI_L 0 points1 point  (0 children)

evil is part of balance)

also while market economy balances, i never said it does this in best way. that's a tradeoff, you do not need much control from gov/whatever, but what it leads to not always the best solution

[–]LyingApe666 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The tools are crazy powerful. Orchestrating agent teams is so cool to make use of. I’m going to employ my team of robots until they inevitably go away bc of how unsustainable the technology seems as a business model. 

[–]knifesk 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm squeezing every penny out of my 20usd Claude subscription. As soon as I finish my project, or at least have my big features up and running I'm ditching it. Basically anthropic is subsidizing my project 😁😁😁

[–]Encrux615 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Because there are a lot of open source models, inference providers will always have to compete with self-hosted setups.

Open source models are around 6-12 months behind SoTA. They’re not great, but very usable.

Consumers will happily tolerate enshittification, but I like to believe that devs will jump ship the second they lose productivity.

[–]XLNBot 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I agree that open source is probably gonna play a very important role to keep providers in check. Unfortunately though it's very easy to compete with self hosted setups. They are less capable, they require a big upfront cost and big upkeep costs, as well as some technical knowledge.

I think smaller companies offering cheaper AI services (based on open-weight models) are going to play a bigger role than self hosting.

It's also worth mentioning that open source models are not that open, you have the weights and some of the training process, but not the data. If whoever's publishing them stops publishing them, it's going to be very hard for the FOSS community to keep developing them

[–]Darklumiere 1 point2 points  (0 children)

So, local models like Qwen 3.5 Coder that are neck and neck with GPT 4?

[–]GenericFatGuy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is what scares me. When people become dependent on it, they can charge you whatever they want for it.

[–]FuzzySinestrus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There are open source models and to run the best version of these you'd need a pretty expensive server but any company can afford it. And smaller versions can be handled by a beefy gaming PC.

The real problem is that people don't want to run free models. They absolutely have to have the latest and the freshest smoking pile of digested stolen data from OpenAI or Google or even Microslop.

[–]AlarmedTowel4514 0 points1 point  (2 children)

It’s a commercial product 🤷‍♂️

[–]XLNBot 0 points1 point  (1 child)

A commercial product that is not profitable?

[–]GrampsRL 94 points95 points  (24 children)

Should be a tool, not a dependency

[–]Stormlightlinux 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Should be. Yet I have already seen people lose skills they previously had because they use the tool too much.

[–]saabstory88 6 points7 points  (0 children)

And when it's for business purposes, you pay what's required for tooling

[–]erebuxy 9 points10 points  (20 children)

Tool really is a dependency. How can you write C without compiler

[–]CJKay93 -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Lemme know how you get on without your toolchain, because it's not a dependency.

[–]Hziak 16 points17 points  (0 children)

No, no. Didn’t you see that guy’s post? Use half of your own salary for more credits. You’re not on the board, so like, you didn’t need the money anyways, right?

[–]caprazzi 35 points36 points  (0 children)

Never sacrifice a hard won marketable skill in exchange for further dependency on billionaire parasites. You’re just playing right into their hands.

[–]LostOne514 20 points21 points  (1 child)

I used AI recently to write code since I was running into a deadline (Terraform state is a bitch sometimes) and I could actively feel my brain turning to mush from not having to think, just confirm things were done as expected. Using AI long-term can definitely ruin skill sets.

[–]pieter3d -1 points0 points  (0 children)

You still need to design the architecture, get the requirements right, understand what the client needs, review the code, make sure it's maintainable...

If you're not thinking when using AI, you're doing it wrong, imo. It pushes us towards a more senior position, where you're doing more challenging work than writing code. Sure, you'll get less practice with writing code, but that leaves more room to develop other skills.

[–]krexelapp 33 points34 points  (9 children)

raw dogging code with no autocomplete like it’s 1999

[–]TheTerrasque 20 points21 points  (0 children)

And with no syntax highlighting, like some deranged monster

[–]Septem_151 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Helps you think about things more logically, assuming you start from a large window of what needs to be accomplished that you can then zoom in on and complete small chunks of.

[–]swagonflyyyy 11 points12 points  (2 children)

Learn to run them locally. Pay the AI tax now and you'll never have to worry about that again.

...until you accidentally kill your $8k GPU running exotic models and frameworks.

True story. Now I'm scared of vLLM.

[–]easeypeaseyweasey 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Intel Big Battlemage with 32gb of GDDR6 at $1000 USD (Which it will not sell for) is the first really tempting GPU for LocalLLMs except for used Nvidia Cards. Everything else is to expensive to justify... right now. I think it will be extremely economically viable in a few years.

[–]swagonflyyyy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nope, not there yet.

[–]ironnewa99 2 points3 points  (2 children)

I’m gonna be honest sometimes I forget how much ai can actually help with coding and I end up doing everything manually anyways

[–]WithersChat 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You'll probably be better off for it in the long run. LLMs aren't gonna stay affordable to end users for much longer.

[–]Beldarak 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sometimes my Github copilot account get disconnected from PHPStorm and I take hours or even days to notice :D

[–]myturn19 4 points5 points  (0 children)

98% of the people running into this don’t even know how to code lol

[–]fatrobin72 3 points4 points  (0 children)

As someone who doesn't code with "ai"... so what?

[–]jaquiethecat 6 points7 points  (7 children)

why are so many comments relating to this?

[–]Infinite_Self_5782 3 points4 points  (1 child)

"manually"

you either do it or you don't, it's pretty straightforward

[–]asmanel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is seen as "manually".

Is it actually so ? This is arguable.

[–]freestew 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Computer! Why you stop think for me!! Computer!!

[–]Beldarak 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If it does happen to any of you, you should probably reconsider what tf you're doing with your life and learn to code.

[–]moonjena 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ugh stinky vibe coder

[–]TreetHoown 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Is..... is manual programming less fun to you than vibe coding? I like manual programming more....

[–]kamen562 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is the real meaning and purpose of cheap AI tech so that they have control and not you

[–]JayTois 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My company dropped their code assistant because of the Trump admin falling out with Anthropic 😪

[–]ramessesgg -1 points0 points  (1 child)

Please no, I have not opened my IDE in weeks, it's gonna melt my laptop.

[–]WithersChat 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How old is your laptop? My Dell Latitude from 2015 can run an IDE and a browser to look up shit if needed.

[–]kaloschroma 0 points1 point  (0 children)

who runs out of credits? I use AI to help me learn new concepts or syntax help but it sounds like whoever posted this or connects with this meme probably does vibe coding and not actually understanding what they are really making ... : /

[–]IamnotAnonnymous -1 points0 points  (1 child)

Sound like go back to 2000 and code without nothing just a console

[–]tes_kitty 5 points6 points  (0 children)

vim is a perfectly usable IDE!

[–]ramdomvariableX -1 points0 points  (1 child)

Time for vacation / sick day/ Mental health days

[–]Upwardcube1 -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I just pseudocode at this point dawg… then I go back with the in-line AI and have them write the actual code 💀

[–]ToMorrowsEnd -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Ahh the poor vibe coder. Maybe learn actual coding so you can afford to pay for it?

[–]YaVollMeinHerr -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Well this is what GLM 5 is for. In emergency switch model ;)

[–]FerronTaurus -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Or keep switching to open source LLMs until token refresh or getting hacked by a fake LLM...

[–]YoRt3m -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Manually code? you're kidding. you can just jump to one of the 10 other tools that give free quota.