> clearly useful for people who took the time to understand it

people -> programmers, I haven’t met a non-developer who reports getting more time out of current AI platforms than they put in. If anything I’ve anecdotally heard the opposite, introducing AI at work creates so much slop (output) it takes more time to process it all without a tangible bump in overall productivity

I have at least a half dozen examples of people not hiring people or buying other tools/subscriptions because they built their own with Claude

> Pmf is this weirdly defined thing where "if you're not sure you have it then you don't".

I'm not sure if this runs counter to your point or not, but: I don't see any future where LLMs aren't a core part of Software Engineering. The horse is out of the barn. There is no going back.

Yeah but the product is not “LLM” it’s “proprietary frontier model LLM paid by the token”.

And I don’t even necessarily disagree with OP! It’s more like the competition is shifting so quickly that your competitors could undercut your PMF in a blink of an eye.

There will be cheaper solutions. And they will generally be less capable than the more expensive ones. Just like most other products.

But my guess is that the cost of SWEs themselves mean that the more expensive ones will be worth the delta to most companies.

But time will tell.

History bears out that cheap and satisficing soundly beats expensive and optimal every time. Until we have smarter and more prescient decision makers in leadership, the bottleneck on output will be the quality of decision making not the quality of code. Trying more things faster and cheaper will win.

Aka the cheap plastic solution always wins.

True but that is maybe 5% of what is being promised by the average booster

Give examples of boosters (average or not) and what they've promised?