llm/fa6df919-50f4-440a-804d-6a9d3e9721d8/topic-15-bd23dfb6-60e9-4333-9b44-d00f0dd89df0-input.json
The following is content for you to summarize. Do not respond to the comments—summarize them. <topic> Race to Bottom Economics # Fears that everyone having access to AI coding will flood markets with competitors, devalue software development, and reduce wages </topic> <comments_about_topic> 1. On top of that there's a not insignificant chance you've actually just stolen the code through an automated copyright whitewashing system. That these people believe they're adding value while never once checking if the above is true really disappoints me with the current direction of technology. LLMs don't make everyone better, they make everything a copy. The upwards transfer of wealth will continue. 2. I've seen this argument a few times before and I'm never quite convinced by it because, well, all those arguments are correct. It was an existential threat to the scribes and destroyed their jobs, the majority of printed books are considered less aesthetically pleasing than a properly illuminated manuscript, and hand copying is considered a spiritual act by many traditions. I'm not sure if I say it's a correct argument, but considering everyone in this thread is a lot closer to being a scribe than a printing press owner, I'm surprised there's less sympathy. 3. Exactly. What makes it even more odd for me is they are mostly describing doing nothing when using their agents. I see the "providing important context, setting guardrails, orchestration" bits appended, and it seems like the most shallow, narrowest moat one can imagine. Why do people believe this part is any less tractable for future LLMs? Is it because they spent years gaining that experience? Some imagined fuzziness or other hand-waving while muttering something about the nature of "problem spaces"? That is the case for everything the LLMs are toppling at the moment. What is to say some new pre-training magic, post-training trick, or ingenious harness won't come along and drive some precious block of your engineering identity into obsolescence? The bits about 'the future is the product' are even stranger (the present is already the product?). To paraphrase theophite on Bluesky, people seem to believe that if there is a well free for all to draw from, that there will still exist a substantial market willing to pay them to draw from this well. 4. Having AI working with and for me is hugely exciting. My creativity is not something an AI can outmode. It will augment it. Right now ideas are cheap, implementation is expensive. Soon, ideas will be more valuable and implementation will be cheap. The economy is not zero sum nor is creativity. 5. The point being missed is the printing press led to tens of millions of jobs and billions of dollars in revenue. So far, when a new technology is introduced that people were initially afraid of, end up creating a whole new set of jobs and industries. 6. Well the lesson is that for all of us who invested a lot of time and effort to become good software developers the value of our skill set is now near zero. 7. At some point no-one is going to have to argue about this. I'm guessing a bit here, but my guess is that within 5 years, in 90%+ jobs, if you're not using an AI assistant to code, you're going to be losing out on jobs. At that point, the argument over whether they're crap or not is done. I say this as someone who has been extremely sceptical over their ability to code in deep, complicated scenarios, but lately, claude opus is surprising me. And it will just get better. 8. > At that point, the argument over whether they're crap or not is done. Not really, it just transforms into a question of how many of those jobs are meaningful anyway, or more precisely, how much output from them is meaningful. 9. This is exactly the case. Businesses in the past wouldn't automate some process because they couldn't afford to develop it. Now they can! Which frees up resources to tackle something else on the backlog. It's pretty exciting. 10. Aren't you afraid it's gonna be a race to the bottom ? the software industry is now whoever pays gemini to deploy something prompted in a few days. Everybody can, so the market will be inundated by a lot of people, and usually this makes for a bad market (a few shiny one gets 90% of the share while the rest fight for breadcrumbs) I'm personally more afraid that stupid sales oriented will take my job instead of losing it to solid teams of dedicated expert that invested a lot of skills in making something on their own. it seems like value inversion 11. Yes, I worry about this quite a bit. Obviously nobody knows yet how it will shake out, but what I've been noticing so far is that brand recognition is becoming more important. This is obviously not a good thing for startup yokels like me, but it does provide an opportunity for quality and brand building. The initial creation and generation is indeed much easier now, but testing, identifying, and fixing bugs is still very much a process that takes some investment and effort, even when AI assisted. There is also considerable room for differentiation among user flows and the way people interact with the app. AI is not good at this yet, so the prompter needs to be able to identify and direct these efforts. I've also noticed in some of my projects, even ones shipped into production in a professional environment, there are lots of hard to fix and mostly annoying bugs that just aren't worth it, or that take so much research and debugging effort that we eventually gave up and accepted the downsides. If you give the AI enough guidance to know what to hunt for, it is getting pretty good at finding these things. Often the suggested fix is a terrible idea, but The AI will usually tell you enough about what is wrong that you can use your existing software engineering skills and experience to figure out a good path forward. At that point you can either fix it yourself, or prompt the AI to do it. My success rate doing this is still only at about 50%, but that's half the bugs that we used to live with that we no longer do, which in my opinion has been a huge positive development. 12. My prediction is that software will be so cheap that very soon, economy of scale gives way to maximum customization which means everyone writes their own software. There will be no software market in the future. 13. Possibly which means devs will have to pivot ... I dont know where though since it would mean most jobs are over and a new economy must be invented 14. I think everyone worries about this. No one knows how it's going to turn out, none of us have any control over it and there doesn't seem to be anything you can do to prepare ahead of time. 15. > I felt in love with the process to be honest. I complained my wife yesterday: "my only problem now is that I don't have enough time and money to pay all the servers", because it opened to me the opportunities to develop and deploy a lot of new ideas. What opportunities? You aren't going to make any money with anything you vibe coded because, even the people you are targeting don't vibe code it, the minute you have even a risk of gaining traction someone else is going to vibe code it anyway . And even if that didn't happen you're just reducing the signal/noise ratio; good luck getting your genuinely good product out there when the masses are spammed by vibe-coded alternatives. When every individual can produce their own software, why do you think that the stuff produced by you is worth paying for? 16. That might be true, but it doesn't have to be immediately true. It's an arbitrage problem: seeing a gap, knowing you can apply this new tool to make a new entrant, making an offering at a price that works for you, and hoping others haven't found a cheaper way or won the market first. In other words, that's all business as usual. How does Glad sell plastic bags when there are thousands of other companies producing plastic bags, often for far, far less? Branding, contracts, quality, pricing -- just through running a business. No guarantee it's gonna work. Vibe-coding something isn't a guarantee the thing is shit. It can be fine. It still takes time and effort, too, but because it can take lot less time to get a "working product", maybe some unique insight the parent commenter had on a problem is what was suddenly worth their time. Will everyone else who has that insight and the vibe coding skills go right for that problem and compete? Maybe, but, also maybe not. If it's a money-maker, they likely will eventually, but that's just business. Maybe you get out of the business after a year, but for a little while it made you some money. 17. > That might be true, but it doesn't have to be immediately true. It's an arbitrage problem: seeing a gap, knowing you can apply this new tool to make a new entrant, making an offering at a price that works for you, and hoping others haven't found a cheaper way or won the market first. In other words, that's all business as usual. I'm hearing what you are saying, but the "business as usual" way almost always requires some money or some time (which is the same thing). The ones that don't (performance arts, for example) average a below-minimum-wage pay! IOW, when the cost of production is almost zero, the market adjusts very quickly to reflect that. What happens then is that a few lottery ticket winners make bank, and everyone else does it for free (or close to it). You're essentially hoping to be one of those lottery ticket winners. > How does Glad sell plastic bags when there are thousands of other companies producing plastic bags, often for far, far less? The cost of production of plastic bags is not near zero, and the requirements for producing plastic bags (i.e. cloning the existing products) include substantial capital. You're playing in a different market, where the cost of cloning your product is zero. There's quite a large difference between operating in a market where there is a barrier (capital, time and skill) and operating in a market where there are no capital, time or skill barriers. The market you are in is not the same as the ones you are comparing your product to. The better comparison is artists, where even though there is a skill and time barrier, the clear majority of the producers do it as a hobby, because it doesn't pay enough for them to do it as a job. 18. All fair points, I think I agree with your take overall but we might each be focusing on situations involving different levels of capital, time, and skill: I'm imagining situations where AI use brought the barrier down substantially for some entrants, but the barriers still meaningfully exist, while it sounds to me like you're considering the essentially zero barrier case. My Glad example was off the cuff but it still feels apt to me for the case I mean: the barrier for an existing plastic product producer who doesn't already to also produce bags is likely very low, but it's still non zero, while the barrier for a random person is quite high. I feel vibe coding made individual projects much cheaper (sometimes zero) for decent programmers, but it hasn't made my mom start producing programming projects -- the barrier still seems quite high for non technical people. 19. I dunno about the Glad bag analogy, and now I'm not sure that the artist analogy applies either. I think a better analogy (i.e. one that we both agree one) is Excel preadsheets. There are very few "Excel consultants" available that companies hire. You can't make money be providing solutions in Excel because anyone who needs something that can be done in Excel can just do it themselves. It's like if your mum needed to sum income and expenditures for a little side-business: she won't be hiring an excel consultant to do write the formulas into the 4 - 6 cells that contain calculations, she'll simply do it herself. I think vibe coding is going to be the same way in a few years (much faster than spreadsheets took off, btw, which occurred over a period of a decade) - someone who needs a little project management applications isn't going to buy one, they can get one in an hour "for free"[1]. Just about anything you can vibe-code, an office worker with minimal training (the average person in 2026, for example) can vibe-code. The skill barrier to vibe-coding little apps like this is less than the skill barrier for creating Excel workbooks, and yet almost every office worker does it. -------------------------------------------------------------- [1] In much the same way that someone considers creating a new spreadsheet to be free when they already have Excel installed, people are going to regard the output of LLMs "free" because they are already paying the monthly fee for it. 20. Do you see any reason why AI and software will not soon take over system analyst or product manager roles? If we can go from natural language prompt to working code, it seems like not too big of a step to set up a system that goes straight from user feedback to code changes. 21. <Here is a joke for you> Factory work began when people could use other people as machines. For example, mechanized looms could weave cloth but each cloth weaving machine needed a machine to run it. So use people. Children, real slaves anyone. Slave labor. Thus began the Factory Age. Now AI can replace people for repetitive labor. AI Can run the machines, it is the new Slave Labor. The problem now is what to do with all the freed slaves? If AI can make us the things that are needed, then how are we needed? We are not. As freed slaves, suddenly we are out of work. We are obsolete. Unfortunately, for corporations that are now rushing to free themselves from the old, difficult, demanding, contentious slaves, they have missed one gigantic element of the equation. Hmmm. What could it be? Can you guess? What could possibly go wrong here? Fortunately, for us - the freed slaves and factory workers - it turns out we are not just slaves after all. We were just trained to be slaves. So we have a future. If we can adapt to being free. And that is not a joke. <End joke. I just made this up, nothing about it is true or even remotely serious. /> 22. If Bill Bryson is to be trusted, the loom actually replaced a massive amount of labor. Prior to invention of labor-savings devices, Britain made 32x less cotton fibre. The inventions in this space put tens of thousands out of work, in what was already a difficult job market due to automation. I’m not sure your first paragraph makes sense. People were dirt cheap, but machines were vastly more productive (and some inventions were stolen so that no royalties had to be paid). 23. We can all have fun being homeless I guess 24. A LOT of what is mentioned for today's frontend and backend developers is really companies dumping more and more responsibility onto developers so they can fire SEOs, Configurations Management specialists, DBAs, etc., so that the company can save more money while burning out more developers. 25. isn't it exactly the opposite? LLMs have killed the generalist, only specialists with very targeted skills have anything marketable 26. Finally we can get rid of those insufferable nerds. /s </comments_about_topic> Write a concise, engaging paragraph (3-5 sentences) summarizing the key points and perspectives in these comments about the topic. Focus on the most interesting viewpoints. Do not use bullet points—write flowing prose.
Race to Bottom Economics # Fears that everyone having access to AI coding will flood markets with competitors, devalue software development, and reduce wages
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