| Completely agree on your first point: software development is so much more than writing code. LLMs are a threat to programmers for whom the job is 8 hours a day of writing code to detailed specifications provided by other people. I can't remember any point in my own career where I worked with people who got to do that. There's a great example of that in the linked post itself: > Let's build a property-based testing suite. It should create Java classes at random using the entire range of available Java features. These random classes should be checked to see whether they produce valid parse trees, satisfying a variety of invariants. Knowing what that means is worth $150/hour even if you don't type a single line of code to implement it yourself! And to be fair, the author makes that point themselves later on: > Agentic AI means that anything you know to code can be coded very rapidly. Read that sentence carefully. If you know just what code needs to be created to solve an issue you want, the angels will grant you that code at the cost of a prompt or two. The trouble comes in that most people don't know what code needs to be created to solve their problem, for any but the most trivial problems. On your second point: I wouldn't recommend betting against costs continuing to fall. The cost reduction trend has been reliable over the past three years. In 2022 the best available models was GPT-3 text-davinci-003 at $60/million input tokens. GPT-5 today is $1.25/million input tokens - 48x cheaper for a massively more capable model. ... and we already know it can be even cheaper. Kimi K2 came out two weeks ago benchmarking close to (possibly even above) GPT-5 and can be run at an even lower cost. I'm willing to bet there are still significantly more optimizations to be discovered, and prices will continue to drop - at least on a per-token basis. We're beginning to find more expensive ways to use the models though. Coding Agents like Claude Code and Codex CLI can churn through tokens. |
I said the same thing about Netflix in 2015 and Gamepass in 2020. It might have taken a while but eventually it happened. And they're gonna have to raise prices higher and faster at some point.