LLM Inevitabilism

From where I'm standing, the models are useful as is. If Claude stopped improving today, I would still find use for it. Well worth 4 figures a year IMO.

only because software engineering pay hasn't adjusted down for the new reality . You don't know what its worth yet.

And they would not be incompetent at targeting. If they were to use the chat history for targeting, they might have the most valuable ad targeting data sets ever built.

The only way I see compensation "adjusting" because of LLMs would need them to become significantly more competent and autonomous.

A quick search shows that click on ads targeting developers are expensive.

Also there is a ton of users asking to rewrite emails, create business plans, translate, etc.

You could even loudly proclaim that the are ads are not targeted by users which HN would love (but really it would just be old school brand marketing).

Citation needed? I can't sit on a bus without spotting some young person using ChatGPT

It would be a hilarious outcome though, “we built machine gods, and the main thing we use them for is to make people click ads.” What a perfect Silicon Valley apotheosis.

Not sure what GP meant specifically, but to me, if $200/m gets you a decent programmer, then $200/m is the new going rate for a programmer.

Sure, now it's all fun and games as the market hasn't adjusted yet, but if it really is true that for $200/m you can 10x your revenue, it's still only going to be true until the market adjusts!

> The competent people do get a productivity boost though.

And they are not likely to remain competent if they are all doing 80% review, 15% prompting and 5% coding. If they keep the ratios at, for example, 25% review, 5% prompting and the rest coding, then sure, they'll remain productive.

OTOH, the pipeline for juniors now seems to be irrevocably broken: the only way forward is to improve the LLM coding capabilities to the point that, when the current crop of knowledgeable people have retired, programmers are not required.

Otherwise, when the current crop of coders who have the experience retires, there'll be no experience in the pipeline to take their place.

If the new norm is "$200/m gets you a programmer", then that is exactly the labour rate for programming: $200/m. These were previously (at least) $5k/m jobs. They are now $200/m jobs.

Basically, they can stop investing in research either when 1) the tech matures and everyone is out of ideas or 2) they have monopoly power from either market power or oracle style enterprise lock in or something. Otherwise they'll fall behind and you won't have any reason to pay for it anymore. Fun thing about "perfect" competition is that everyone competes their profits to zero

High level languages also massively boosted productivity, but we didn't see salaries collapse from that.

> And they are not likely to remain competent if they are all doing 80% review, 15% prompting and 5% coding.

I've been doing 80% review and design for years, it's called not being a mid or junior level developer.

> OTOH, the pipeline for juniors now seems to be irrevocably broken

I constantly get junior developers handed to me from "strategic partners", they are just disguised as senior developers. I'm telling you brother, the LLMs aren't helping these guys do the job. I've let go 3 of them in July alone.

You don't need every individual request to be profitable, just the aggregate. If you're doing a Google search for, like, the std::vector API reference you won't see ads. And that's probably true for something like 90% of the searches. Those searches have no commercial value, and serving results is just a cost of doing business.

By serving those unmonetizable queries the search engine is making a bet that when you need to buy a new washing machine, need a personal injury lawyer, or are researching that holiday trip to Istanbul, you'll also do those highly commercial and monetizable searches with the same search engine.

Chatbots should have exactly the same dynamics as search engines.

All of which made it much less likely that users would bolt in response to each real monetization step. This is very different to the current situation, where we have a shifting landscape with several AI companies, each with its strengths. Things can change, but it takes time for 1-2 leaders to consolidate and for the competition to die off. My 2c.

you think those people don't believe the magic computer when it talks?

Techies are also great for network growth and verification for other users, and act as community managers indirectly.

Which may be for the best, because people shouldn’t be implicitly trusting the bullshit engine.

This is why AI companies must lose money short term. The moment improvements plateau or the economic environment changes, everyone will cut back on research.

Traditional banner ads, inserted inline into the conversation based on some classifier seem a far better idea.

What do you think a product manager is doing?

It doesn't sound like you are disagreeing with me: that role you described is one of manager, not of programmer.

> High level languages also massively boosted productivity, but we didn't see salaries collapse from that.

Those high level languages still needed actual programmers. If the LLM is able to 10x the output of a single programmer because that programmer is spending all their time managing, you don't really need a programmer anymore, do you?

> I've been doing 80% review and design for years, it's called not being a mid or junior level developer.

Maybe it differs from place to place. I was a senior and a staff engineer, at various places including a FAANG. My observations were that even staff engineer level was still spending around 2 - 3 hours a day writing code. If you're 10x'ing your productivity, you almost certainly aren't spending 2 - 3 hours a day writing code.

> I constantly get junior developers handed to me from "strategic partners", they are just disguised as senior developers. I'm telling you brother, the LLMs aren't helping these guys do the job. I've let go 3 of them in July alone.

This is a bit of a non-sequitor; what does that have to do with breaking the pipeline for actual juniors?

Without juniors, we don't get seniors. Without seniors and above, who will double-check the output of the LLM?[1]

If no one is hiring juniors anymore, then the pipeline is broken. And since the market price of a programmer is going to be set at $200/m, where will you find new entrants for this market?

Hell, even mid-level programmers will exit, because when a 10-programmer team can be replaced by a 1-person manager and a $200/m coding agent, those 9 people aren't quietly going to starve while the industry needs them again. They're going to go off and find something else to do, and their skills will atrophy (just like the 1-person LLM manager skills will atrophy eventually as well).

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[1] Recall that my first post in this thread was to say that the LLM coding agents have to get so good that programmers aren't needed anymore because we won't have programmers anymore. If they aren't that good when the current crop starts retiring then we're in for some trouble, aren't we?

Which is still too much trust

You keep saying this, but I don't see it. The current tools just can't replace developers. They can't even be used in the same way you'd use a junior developer or intern. It's more akin to going from hand tools to power tools than it is getting an apprentice. The job has not been automated and hasn't been outsourced to LLMs.

Will it be? Who knows, but in my personal opinion, it's not looking like it will any time soon. There would need to be more improvement than we've seen from day 1 of ChatGPT until now before we could even be seriously considering this.

> Those high level languages still needed actual programmers.

So does the LLM from day one until now, and for the foreseeable future.

> This is a bit of a non-sequitor; what does that have to do with breaking the pipeline for actual juniors?

Who says the pipeline is even broken by LLMs? The job market went to shit with rising interest rates before LLMs hit the scene. Nobody was hiring them anyway.

Software guys are doing much, much more than treating LLM's like an improved Stack Overflow. And a lot of them are willing to pay.

On the other end, I know a guy who writes deeply proprietary embedded code that lives in EV battery controllers and he's found LLMs useless.

Many people have a lot of trust in anything ChatGPT tells them.

For example, the more product placement opportunities there are, the more products can be placed, so sooner or later that'll become an OKR to the "content side" of the business as well.

I know I don't have as much of a filter as I ought to!

https://www.lesswrong.com/s/pmHZDpak4NeRLLLCw/p/TiDGXt3WrQwt...

I find this surprising. I figured the opposite: that the quality of body shop type places would improve and the productivity increases would decrease as you went "up" the skill ladder.

I've worked on/inherited a few projects from the Big Name body shops and, frankly, I'd take some "vibe coded" LLM mess any day of the week. I really figured there was nowhere to go but "up" for those kinds of projects.

In that case it seems to depend on what you mean by "replacing", doesn't it? It doesn't mean a non-developer can do a developers job, but it does mean that one developer can do two developer's jobs. That leads to a lot more competition for the remaining jobs and presumably many competent developers will accept lower salaries in exchange for having a job at all.