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by spaceywilly 427 days ago
To play devils advocate, software engineering is currently proving to be a hugely valuable use case for AI, and will almost certainly grow over time. I’m not sure what the market cap for software engineering tooling is, but I assume $5B or even $10B would only represent a tiny fraction of the TAM.

Here is one report that projects a $25B market by 2030. It would not take long to recoup their investment if that prediction comes true.

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/03/26/304970...
2 comments
paxys 427 days ago
The software engineering market is one thing, but these editors are all basically VS Code + custom theme + calls to ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini. Useful, sure, but worth $5-10B each? Without users, revenue or even a brand?
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dogma1138 427 days ago
The value right now is learning which prompts work, which strategies work, what is the sweet spot in terms of model size, is it better to run a model that costs 10 times more per token vs smaller inferior models that might need have 3 attempts at it, what are the best RAG and other enrichment strategies etc.

You can only really get that when you have a large market share.

When your IDE makes a call to OpenAI they get to see only half the picture they don’t know how the user reacts to the output.

So there is a lot of value in being in the client loop also and seeing the full picture.

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paxys 427 days ago
You know who else has that data, that too for free? OpenAI.
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dogma1138 426 days ago
OpenAI only sees half the picture, that’s why they want to be in the IDE also so they can get all the usage metrics from the user viewpoint.
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nivertech 426 days ago
> Here is one report that projects a $25B market by 2030

My guess it's much larger than $25B

This is no longer a market for software tooling, it's started to eat the software engineering salaries, freelancer marketplaces and consulting/outsourcing/bodyshop revenues...

If there are ~ 30M developers now globally, earning $100K/yr on average, and this will reduce it to 20M, so we get 10M * $100K = $1T

Even assuming that 90% will go to foundational models, not IDEs / coding agents SW, we still get ~ $100B

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