I'm a software engineer, completing 10 years of professional experience this year. I started my career as a web frontend engineer (it was easier for me to de...
The ai bubble is currently being subsidized to an unimaginable degree. If you were to actually pay true cost for your token usage, you wouldn’t be saving that much over an engineer’s salary. Probably even worse once AI companies start to extract a real profit. 95% of companies diving into agentic labor will be in for a rude awakening when they balance next year’s budget.
The cost to keep ai useful in its current form has a high floor. Unless you keep up with expensive training, your models will drift. You can only scale your model intelligence with more hardware (roughly). In two years, Claude opus 4.8 will still be bloating context to learn about the latest cloud platforms and libraries. A human engineer will get those passively at no cost to the company.
As the complexity of the task grows the complexity of the ai babysitter must match it. Even if Ai stays cost effective, companies can now save money by spinning up bespoke in-house software to cut out vendors (think observability platforms, task tracking, product design, marketing systems, etc…). No matter how many adversarial reviews and sub agents you spin up, an Ai can’t grasp the full context of your company and it’s shifting priorities. The software engineer role transitions to a pseudo-sysadmin + product architect.
C-suites don’t want know about software and don’t care about non functional requirements (security, availability, audit ability, etc…). They just want to wave a magic wand and have a product appear, which is what Ai provides the illusion of. That’s why all current Ai software is garbage, but the smarter companies will catch on
A human engineer will get those passively at no cost to the company.
Some human engineers. I still regularly have to explain Git to people that never bothered to learn.
Also I think you are forgetting that AI is still improving and getting cheaper. Not super quickly, but even if it is too expensive now, is that still going to be true in 10 years? I doubt it.
It’s not getting cheaper. Every new model has been getting more expensive. OpenAI and Anthropic both want to IPO, but that means they need to start trying to make a profit. Their prices have been going through the roof.
Those same models can only do the shitty work they were able to do before the new models came out. You’re not making a point that anything is getting cheaper.
We literally have self-driving cars now. In super-easy driving locations like San Francisco to be fair, but that’s not nothing. They’re supposed to be launching in London this year too.
The post misses a few things:
C-suites don’t want know about software and don’t care about non functional requirements (security, availability, audit ability, etc…). They just want to wave a magic wand and have a product appear, which is what Ai provides the illusion of. That’s why all current Ai software is garbage, but the smarter companies will catch on
Some human engineers. I still regularly have to explain Git to people that never bothered to learn.
Also I think you are forgetting that AI is still improving and getting cheaper. Not super quickly, but even if it is too expensive now, is that still going to be true in 10 years? I doubt it.
It’s not getting cheaper. Every new model has been getting more expensive. OpenAI and Anthropic both want to IPO, but that means they need to start trying to make a profit. Their prices have been going through the roof.
It is getting cheaper to do the same thing. New models are more expensive but also more capable.
But it’s not getting cheaper to do the same thing. Models charge by the token the price per token is going up. They don’t charge by the outcome.
The price per token for the same model isn’t going up (if you are paying per token anyway - I know they underpriced subscriptions).
Those same models can only do the shitty work they were able to do before the new models came out. You’re not making a point that anything is getting cheaper.
People kept saying same thing about self driving cars. Look where it will be in 5 to 10 years. 10 years later and … meh
It’s expensive to keep those models trained. Investors won’t do this forever.
We literally have self-driving cars now. In super-easy driving locations like San Francisco to be fair, but that’s not nothing. They’re supposed to be launching in London this year too.
Okey dokey
Same here I’m in awe that humanity has made it this far. I can’t believe the shit I have to put up with