Sound more like the latter group likes having things made for them, ideally without paying for it.

That's not how I read it at all. Why do you think the latter group likes free stuff made for them?

Right now the AI companies are selling their product at a loss to try to get us hooked. I think it's fair to describe the current situation as "unreasonably cheap", though free is a bit of a stretch.

It will be interesting to see what happens when human developers become cheaper than token maxxing AIs.

Interesting because by then codebases might have become so complex that these can no longer be modified, maintained nor understood by humans, so replacing AI with HI (human intelligence) will simply no longer possible.

That then represents a certain vendor lock-in or Mafia stand off: either keeping paying or have all the code go up in smoke.

Certainly not everyone will be facing this dilemma, but it certainly isn’t sci-fi considering the track-record of big tech.

Will the LLM tools be able to maintain this pile of code either? In my experience there seems to be some complexity maximum to a project that, once reached, the LLM tooling doesn't seem able to manage it either.

The new Moore’s Law? Every X months a new complexity level is reached.

Or perhaps AGI is reached and suddenly AI solves this all by itself.

I think it's more like the latter group likes the dopamine hit brought on my getting attention from release stuff.

I never even said what the product is, it's for my job.

Maybe you get a dopamine hit from comments like that.

This is why I say that those who say "AI is a tool" don't quite have it right. AI is a service. Your power saw doesn't cut the wood for you while you go do something else, and then ask if you would like it planed next.

It depends on whether you are using the LLM as a) an advanced autocomplete; b) a chatbot/query interface; or c) an agent. Only the latter goes and does things for you.

It's also confusing that the term AI has become synonymous with LLMs as it covers other things like text prediction/correction.

So AI can be a tool or a service depending on how you are using it and what you are using it for.

It’s more work than before LLMs (but I get way more), but you're right that I don't pay since I run local models.

@dang @tomhow If you want to practice fairness for once in your lives