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mdale

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I think the frontier will command premium for sometime just as slight better software developers were 10x's vs their peers as their architecture & development strategies and code approach compounded quickly. One less error per block of work compounds quickly.

Sure, there may be some cases and reasons for local models and industry is so large they will continue to make progress and gather economic value and users for specific use case; but frontier will command vast majority of the economic value distinct from Linux and open source where the model created better than proriatary economic incentives around development

Literal money transfer is not the point. It's about power and concentration of it to insulate future consolidation of power.

Money is made up system to provide a relatively stable society; if that stops working it's not good; violence becomes what's left.

Maria Sam Antoinette and brethren saying let them eat cake (or everyone will just build new things with (our) AI) without a sense of what is happening / about to happen to the broader populous is on a similar track.

The "billionaires" should use their influence to help with this transition invest figuring out how these new system will work.

No one should care if that means more "millionaires" vs less billionaires these numbers as social constructs; the point is power and self determination. History shows lacking that for too many will breakdown to broad violence and or dystopic robot overloads guarding a diminishing small and isolated elite.

The time to course correct is now.

GPT-5.3-Codex 6 months ago

I think it's just both companies building/ marketing to the strength of their competitor. As general perception has been the opposite for codex and Opus respectfully.

As the OP outlined 10x is common place now; where as my best day pre-AI may have been 500 LOC now 5K LOC per day is routine. So a few months on a solo project has produced ~500k lines of code.

The code base is disproportionally testing automation, telemetry and monitoring systems but a lot code none the less ;) So even in a solo/small team project depend on architecture, procedures, test suites etc. over knowing every line of code.

Cursor 1.7 10 months ago

Was spending a lot with cursor switching between sonnet and opus 4.1s like 1500 to $2k a month. Was doing a lot of tabs in parallel of course. Output was like 5k lines on Good day. (Lines not the best measurement) But a yard stick against feature testing and rework.

Now with gpt-5-codex and codex vs code ext .. getting through up to 20k line changes in a day again lots of parallel jobs; but codex allows for less rework.

The job of the "engineer" has changed a lot. At 5k lines I was not reviewing every detail but it was possible to skim over what had changed. At 20k it's more looking at logs performance / arch & observation of features less code is reviewed.

Maybe soon just looking at outcomes. Things are moving quickly.

The poorly named "Autopilot" is a good analogy. The LLMs can definitely help with the drudgery of stop and go traffic with little risk; but take your eye off the road for one second when your moving too fast and your dead.

For an increasing set of product attracting attention and midshare is the product. Creator economy; open source projects that have many stars safer to use then ones that don't. AWS better to use than some small competitor because you know many others are in that same boat. "Not fired for using Microsoft" etc.

Widely used and viewed is value; less and less does a product evaluation work in isolation. So very difficult to evaluate products fairly in that sense. Something may be better but it's only in so far that your review agragation / index is a fair market for attention.

Think GitHub stars and amazon reviews for products or product hunt for new startups, or YouTube or LinkedIn views; all have their game of gathering attention / marketing that plays into products visibility and viability.

I think it's fair to call out a action reaction flow that got us here; but if we can't see we have swag into something far more destructive to free speech as the article outlines; I don't count this as intellectual honest discussion.

We are past the point of "everyone has their perspective on this" right and left have their own version of this etc. The system that protected people's right to have different opinions is being dismantled.

It's like we go out to a twelve course dinner and get home and there is one 10 calories carrot on the table and we are tweeting to no end about our genius and our total transparently and robust diet of throwing away that carrot. "Carrots don't taste good anyways" they screen and people cheer.

Meanwhile we are actually losing vision and dying of obesity.

There is plenty to do to get more healthy for real; but that's not where we are heading with these initiatives so far:

https://prospect.org/economy/2025-01-27-we-found-the-2-trill...

There is an element global competition no ? Controlling more of global trade is advantageous. It's not that they want others you fail; they just want a bigger pice of the pie.

Sure; but negotiations involve a give and take. You can't push things in the a direction if you just tout your purity and one side gives in and gets rolled over.

I think some progress was made getting TikTok on US servers and the US hires etc. Maybe more transparency in how the company operated or observers within could have been good next steps. Maybe some mutual concession with some version of US media operating within China.

Ideally finding benefit to nation states competition benefits global citizens in some way such as the green race transition to renewables is good ... Can we have privacy and democratic media race somehow? ... Maybe not possible :)

I was in a co-working space where it said "earthquake take cover"; on everyone's phone at once and then the earthquake hit very soon after. I guess it was enough time to get under a desk but everyone was just confused and then maybe even more stressed by the time the earthquake hit.

At first I thought this article was going to be a about life expectancy for startup workers vs other companies

It's getting better and new UIs for it are being tested like Claude and artifacts.

Sr. Eng adopted copilot and sung it's praises a lot faster then the jr engineers. Especially when working on codebases with less familiar languages.

This article seems to have a big miss the basic point on exponential technical progress shifting the "comparative constraint" every 18 months.

A $35 raspberry pi AI chess blows away deep blue from algorithmic and compute progress. So the comparative constraint is on a exponential fall off curve not a constant per "more valuable" areas to be automated. Not only that a bright highschool student can research a bit online and build a competitive solution given algorithmic and compute advantages of today vs late 90s

Right now it may cost $10 Dollars in compute and a day guiding GPT4 to productive economic activity; but GPT7-turbo will cost 2c and take 2 min of guidance for equivalent comparative value.

It would make no sense to look at early computers and say phone operators will always have a job because of the comparative cost constraints of automating phone switch boards with computers will use "too much energy" and there are "more valuable things" for computers to do vs low cost of human operators.

Fair to say that jobs will change :)

I don't get why this would be someone's position. If it "barely works" it would not sustain mass usage across many product lines.

Just recently, I used generative AI integrated into databricks to build complex sql queries via English, used Google Gemini in Google sheet to formula a tricky pivot table, chatGPT build a cloud formation schema for new infra for a service & to navigate some tricky database primarily key setup for dynamodb; used copilot integrated into my IDE to speed up unit test and simple refractors and code complete every other line written.

I nor the other millions of subscribers to these tools are not subscribed because it barely works it's because it lets me work more efficiently.

It save tons of time across many product for many things that used to be sources of frustration or slow mundane tasks.