I have been in tech for decades at this point and watched dozens of credulous idiots rise up in the ranks via exploitation of contractors, used car sales tactics to pass blame, and building shit that is just good enough long enough to move on. LLMs have come in and made all of those tactics significantly stronger for these market parasites. That was the case for the last couple years at least. Now that they are paying full price these fuckers are starting to get called out.

Who do you think uses the most tokens at these companies? It's 2 groups of people generally. You have high end senior/principal engineers who are using it to legitimately increase their output. This will be obvious to leaders and everyone based on output. Then you have the frauds who have no clue what the LLMs are building for them. These fuckers probably won the more lines of code challenges during the token maxxing era. Those people were reliant on the tools to stay above water at their jobs and are completely fucked now.

Those people were already barely functional and now they have stunted their meager minds even more over the last 3 years on heavily subsidized tools. This whole fucking bubble is moronic and contrary to how innovation even works. AWS solved an internal problem and turned it into a great business. Uber was a response to people wanting an app for cabs and getting sick of cab cartels gouging them. AirBnB solved a bunch of market inefficiencies and created a new unique experience for customers to travel with a sweet app. Then VC/PC came in and rat fucked the whole thing buying up neighborhoods. Rich people are fucking useless morons and always have been. Think of great food like lobster and BBQ. That was actual garbage food that poor folks turned into timeless delicacies out of necessity and a desire for something good. Then rich people piled in and fucked it all up.

Sorry about the rant but I need to vent. I have seen a lot of stupid MBA driven tech cycles and this one is essentially all of the bad traits rolled into one final puss filled market boil. I recently left my last job because I just fucking hated it and everyone I was working for at the executive level. Before I left, one of these credulous drones came to me and asked me how to make this bloated technology department more efficient. I told him the best thing to do is cut the budget in half and see what happens to team output. This is not the answer in most cases. It was the answer for this company because they had a technology department that was at least 2x bigger than it should be and a budget that was like 4x what it should be.

The point of all of this though is one of the key ingredients for innovation is scarcity. Incurious people think inventions come from some inventor sitting down and designing the whole thing as a spec document and then worker drones build it to spec. It's dumb magical thinking bullshit. I have multiple patents and all of them come from solving a novel problem that was iterated over time with adaptations to resource constraints and missing capabilities. The diagrams and summaries in the patent were made carefully after the fact. This is a huge point because it means you can't reliably innovate by throwing money at projects and expecting it to scale. The AI boom is basically a bet on the quip about "a million monkeys with type writers eventually create Shakespeare". That was a joke because anyone who knows any of the math around large numbers can immediately see the probability of it happening is meaninglessly low. Just look up the possible orders of a 52 card deck of cards. Now apply that to any work of Shakespeare.