> The cost of turning written business logic into code has dropped to zero

Didn’t realize this was science fiction.

I am thinking about this a lot right now. Pretty existential stuff.

I think builders are gonna be fine. The type of programmer were people would put up with just because they could really go in their cave for a few days and come out with a bug fix that nobody else on the team could figure out is going to have a hard time.

Interestingly AI coding is really good at that sort of thing and less good at fully grasping user requirements or big picture systems. Basically things that we had to sit in meetings a lot for.

With all due respect to the author, this is a lot of words for not much substance. Rehashing the same thoughts everyone already thinks but not being bold enough to make a concrete prediction.

This is the time for bold predictions, you’ve just told us we’re in a crucible moment yet you end the article passively….

> The cost of turning written business logic into code has dropped to zero. Or, at best, near-zero.

Zero if you dont consider Anthropic's API pricing, the prompter's hourly rate and verification bottleneck.

I personally love this development. Sure, I find some pleasure in writing code. But what I love most is mapping out a gnarly problem on pen and paper. Then the code is "just" an implementation detail. Guess I'm an ideas guy as per the author?

> The cost of turning written business logic into code has dropped to zero

Tokens are free now?

I predict it's going to be a bloodbath. People who worked for Big Tech have no idea what's coming. Some of us software engineers who have been outside have been experiencing issues for almost a decade. The industry is extremely anti-competitive.

Whatever you produce, nobody is going to use unless you produce it under the banner of Big Tech. There are no real opportunities for real founders.

This feeling of doom that software engineers started to feel after LLMs is how I was feeling 5 years earlier. People are confused because they think the problem is that AI is automating them but reality is that our problems arise from a deeper systemic issue at the core of our economic system. AI is just a convenient cover story, it's not the reason why we are doomed. Once people accept that we can start to work towards a political solution like UBI or better...

I personally believe (and so far, my evidence suggests) that AI doesn't anywhere near as well as claimed for almost any of its use cases.

However, let's suppose the alternate case:

If AI works as claimed, people in their tens of millions will be out of work.

New jobs won't be created quickly enough to keep them occupied (and fed).

Billionaires own the media and the social media and will use it to attempt to prevent change (i.e. apocalyptic taxation)

What, then, will those people do? Well, they say "the devil makes work for idle hands", and I'm curious what that's going to look like.

I own (cofounded) a medium-sized saas business with hundreds of employees. I maintain final decision of everything technical and still code every day because it’s important. All of the engineers use LLM tools, you’d be stupid not to. But I need good engineers, I replace good engineers when someone leaves, and the business itself is so much larger than just programming. The system is just so huge and complex, and I am the benevolent dictator that architected it and maintains the core design decisions, that the LLM does not replace the need for engineers nor my own expertise.

Furthermore if we were truly in the utopia the author describes, why do all the LLM companies employ (and pay top dollar) for so many engineers? Why does OpenAI pay for slack when they could just vibe code a chat app in an hour?

The challenge of building a real, valuable software business (or any business) is so much harder than using LLM to prompt “build me a successful software business”

When these vibe coded projects realise that maintenance, security updates, API changes are still needed. Get ready for a massive swing back to senior software developers being in demand.

Playing software maintainer while many vibe coded web apps aren't built with proper software architecture or practices only makes the swing back to senior engineers being in demand a possibility.

Good luck to those who are building 600K-LOC vibe coded web apps with 40+ APIs stitched together.

I feel like YC has a bunch of these optimistic blog posts ready to throw up on the front page anytime something goes viral about how LLMs are bad.

Software isnt going to become more economically valuable its going to be used to replace economic inputs of labor with units of compute.

Its entirely intended to take humans out of the equation or devalue human labor and it always has. Dont be a fool.