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by ethanpil 179 days ago 

  >  It took two initial prompts and a few tiny follow-ups. GPT-5.2 running in Codex CLI ran uninterrupted for several hours, burned through 1,464,295 input tokens, 97,122,176 cached input tokens and 625,563 output tokens and ended up producing 9,000 lines of fully tested JavaScript across 43 commits.
Using a random LLM cost calculator, this amounts to $28.31... pretty reasonable for functional output.

I am now confident that within 5-10 years (most/all?) junior & mid and many senior dev positions are going to drop out enormously.

Source: https://www.llm-prices.com/#it=1464295&cit=97123000&ot=62556...
3 comments
elcritch 179 days ago
This is for porting an existing project. It’s an ideal case for LLMs. The results are still pretty different for building up a library from scratch.

However this changes the economics for languages with smaller ecosystems!

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almostgotcaught 179 days ago
> I am now confident that within 5-10 years (most/all?) junior & mid and many senior dev positions are going to drop out enormously.

yes because this is what we do all day every day (port existing libraries from one language to another)....

like do y'all hear yourselves or what?

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hatefulheart 179 days ago
I’m afraid the boosters hear nothing.

The commenter you’re replying to, in their heart of hearts, truly believes in 5 years that an LLM will be writing the majority of the code for a project like say Postgres or Linux.

Worth bearing in mind the boosters said this 5 years ago, and will say this in 5 years time.

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igouy 178 days ago
I would guess that the vast majority are not writing code for a project like Postgres or Linux.

> (most/all?) junior & mid and many senior dev positions

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hatefulheart 177 days ago
What purpose does this statement serve?

Everyone working in programming is writing code for a project more like Postgres or Linux than they are a project like making a wood cabinet or a life drawing.

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afro88 179 days ago
People say this kind of thing a lot, but in reality the concept of "software engineer" will change and there will still be experience levels with different expectations
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