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This seems like an easily testable assumption. Without the easily obtained data this comment is useless speculation at best.

If if it were true, who cares? Most startups fail. Most are terrible ideas and/or terribly executed. I fail to see why it's a useful metric.

Less federal aid means fewer students can afford our insanely expensive educational system

Are we sure about this or is federal aid one of the reasons education is so expensive?

Yeah I just switched to 5.6-sol I think?

I close out after a task is complete. I rarely want the previous context to feed into the next task.

Not correct. I'm assuming it's an enterprise plan. I have no idea what deal my company has worked out with OpenAI but I do not yet have a personal account (but soon will when I have the time to spin up proxmox on my compute brick that's been gathering dust since last year).

Correct. This is not a consumer plan.

My numbers come from the spend my company makes using our corporate plan. Not sure what the pricing is relative to any other plan. It's definitely not the consumer rate as we're a pretty big shop burning a lot of tokens as a whole.

I'll agree but from the other direction. AI continues to absorb my job as a senior systems software engineer (c/c++) and after a couple months I've only spent a few hundred dollars using gpt-5.5/5.6 and codex. I have no idea what people are doing to burn so many tokens but for me this is laughably cheap and every day I discover new capabilities. I don't care if costs go up or down, it's so cheap for what I get that I don't care.

For the past couple months I've been "managing" Codex to do plenty of grunt work. Granted I'm not one to produce thousands of lines per month(systems engineer, mostly bug fixing and extending a large library which sits on top of proprietary HW), but I think my SOTA model use for the period is under $200. Getting a jr to do the work would have been more frustrating and cost 100x more. Sure, it would have been in society's interests to train a junior dev, I'm not arguing against external benefits to it. But damn, I am now convinced coding is going away as a skill and certainly in 5 years I will never deal with code directly ever again. Oh and I've learned, or relearned, a lot while working with LLMs. I am a better engineer now than I was a few months ago.

I wouldn't blame them either, but I sure as hell wouldn't hire them.

Going back 29 years to the beginning of my career, I'd say maybe 50% of the graduates in my class, probably more, either were not cut out to be engineers or didn't really have any passion for it(or both).

I can't imagine what the ratio is now after everyone was pushing their kids into coding and every douchbag chasing a high salary tried to enter the field. Maybe close to 90%?

I can't imagine there is much of an issue for bright, passionate folks just starting their career if they can manage to communicate their passion and skills to a company. Sure, they might not go directly to a fang, but there are literally tens of thousands of companies who staff engineers and if I were new that's where I'd target to get started.

Not my experience, but I'm still new at this.

The way I have worked so far is to look for ways I can influence the model's "thinking" and then add that to my main AGENTS.md. I try to steer it towards a thought process that mirrors or exceeds my own. I find it a fun challenge. I think this stuff becomes less necessary in a year or so as these sorts of tweaks become part of the shipped product from the model makers.

I can already do that with my phone and google lens. I don't have to strap extra crap to my face or let a device spy on everything I see.

Why is decimating our local car industry a problem? Why not build something else with the resources if cars are now a cheap commodity?

Sure but then why use it? I like my editor. Codex CLI and vim/slickedit works for me.

I think you're reading quite a bit into my comment.. I'll try to respond to a more accurate response to my comment but I'm not going to waste time with this sort of response.

It's already going away for me in a sense as I build up a library of AGENTS.md and Codex skills. I see no reason such things won't get baked in at the agent layer so that domain specific rules and such are automatically applied when appopriate.

Does it have a plugin library as extensive as Codex? I've started to leverage the plugin ecosystem to fuse data from chat history, wikis, emails, etc.

Define "large tasks".

I actually don't let AI take on large tasks beyond test writing and refactoring helper scripts/utils. I keep it on a very short leash for driver/middleware code since the quality bar needs to be extremely high for our codebase. Up until recently I didn't even trust it for that, but some experiments show it's fairly good and even detected issues outside of the refactored functions which I did let it touch. This is with a good amount of 'thought engineering' though where I try to think hard about how to emphasize certain factors and define the problem as best I can.

they are paying for marketshare/customer base

Or are they paying for talent? It seems like xAI is sorely lacking in talent, most likely due to the CEO and folks' aversion to him. By throwing around some SpaceX monopoly money he can trap some talent with retention clauses and try to invigorate his failed AI business.

Yes, I tried to use Cursor as an editor. Terrible idea in hindsight.

So your workflow now looks like mine except I prefer a different editor and only use the latest and greatest model so Cursor basically offers nothing over Codex.

I disagree about prompt engineering, but it's one of those things that probably varies because of what language you use, what problems you solve, and the degree to which you care about the output. Unless I'm writing tests, I keep AI on a very short leash because I'm writing critical code used by a very large number of users. I have noticed big differences in output quality depending on how I steer AI. Without steering, it will happily leave in dead code, change the use of variables so they need to be renamed, assume or fail to assume invariants, etc. As I said in another comment, I think we won't need to do that for very much longer, but right now it seems essential.

The code suggestions. It's highly distracting and pulls me out of my flow. I know how to code and I don't mind typing. I don't need AI making trivial suggestions. I want it to do exactly what I tell it to do.

Right now I think there is an edge to how you construct prompts and config files. There is a large difference between "modify f() to do..." and "modify f() to do... Review the current variables and make sure they are still used consistent with their naming. Look for unreachable and dead code. Examine callers and called functions for side effects from the introduced changes...".

I don't think that will make much difference in a year.

I stopped using Cursor when I started getting comfortable with Codex/Claude. Cursor is just annoying with the constant popups and it's just not as good. Now my workflow is to use my normal editor, add a todo describing what I want, and then ask Codex+gpt-5.5 to implement it. It absolutely nails it. Using codex is so much more like working with a partner vs the noise and annoyance of Cursor.

That said, I think we're in a narrow window of time right now where any of this matters. Prompt "engineering" and working around your tools will be over in a year or so.

Fwiw I am a c/c++ systems engineer. I think anyone mentioning anecdotal experience like this should clarify. Maybe frontend JavaScript folks have a totally different take and that's expected.

It's really not. For us, changing compiler versions has noticeable effects throughout our codebase. I'm glad you don't have to deal with that though.

The arbitrary and non-deterministic nature of LLM workflows gives me full on ick. As an old embedded/systems guy I have always prioritized determinism and repeatability in my workflows.

But damn, agents are amazing and I'm enjoying being a "thought process designer". I'm not going back. Even if AI development stops today my career will never be the same.

A lot of us are too busy solving problems. Learning about the latest language features, which we often won't be able to use anyway due to the trouble of moving a large dev environment to a newer standard, feels like academic masturbation.

C++ folks are very much into their language, and can't seem to understand that most folks don't want to dedicate significant amounts of mental resources purely to language details.

Yeah I think it was

I'd rather have two dishwashers and an automated loading/dispensing system built into each one. The dishwasher is already a fairly optimal dish storage device. Using somewhat standardized dish dimensions would make it fairly easy to implement.