> Seriously, what value are tokens providing other than justifying layoffs
Like the OP said, it's incredible how polarizing this debate is. When I read comments like yours, I feel like a significant part of the global workforce in IT must be living on another planet? Or they never really used Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, ... intensively before because of company policies?
I legitimately am at least 10x more productive than a year ago, and I can prove it in number of commits and finished monetizable features developed per day. Obviously my workflows still very much require an active, constantly context-switching human-in-the-loop, but to me there's absolutely no question both output volume & quality have skyrocketed.
And that's my point about value. That engineers can spit out far more code, or that they don't have to think much is surely precious convenience.
Value add so far lacks evidence.
Layoffs. It justifies them to the public. I'm not certain it grants them as it contradicts a principle of enterprise: scale, as much as you possibly can.
If tokens provided value today, we would be hiring more engineers to review their output and put things together.
I literally wrote how I measure this in the post you are replying to: #commits which is admittedly a worthless proxy for productivity, so, more importantly, number of finished production-ready features delivered.
That number is at least tenfold of what it was before, simply because I can run a lot of gruntwork in parallel now without wasting brainpower and focus on that stuff.
There are millions of other wanna be engineers doing exactly the same, assuming demand will scale as much as the offer.
What returns are you getting on those?
Let me create 500 websites, deployed for free, I hand that over to you by end of day. Will you give me a cent per piece? If so, happy to do business with you.
The value is obviously to the people who will use this to replace engineers.
I would happily pay $200 a month for this. Luckily I dont need to, it's free.
Literally every game and website that I would have had to pay someone else to make I can now make myself. There's no value in that?
A year ago the best free LLM couldn't even give me a basic gridmap and collision. Now it can give me a full RCT style prototype & editor in 20 iterations.
I can only imagine what improvements we will have NEXT year!
There are over 2 million games, for Android alone.
That you weren't making games before the advent of LLMs makes it cool for you to build, and at no cost. But people have been able to make games without them and already grew the market to saturation.
If the outcome of LLMs is that we get more games, it won't imply that people will consume more games. Most games never get played anyway.
There's nothing to "ponder" as you so patronizingly put it, and your stats on gaming are self-evident.
Op never said they're selling games. They said they're making their own games and websites for a fraction of the cost (even $0). That's amazing value. And it's just getting better.
The funding is in anticipation of AI becoming so good that mistakes are only seen in the most complex output. In consumer applications, it's hard not to see that happening, given the exponential improvements of the past year. Whoever gets there first can capture the market.
Isn't this just an artifact of their chain-of-thought reasoning? If they are verbose in their output, it's more likely the next word predicted is actually correct.
Also, I see this more as a feature than a bug. In many projects I inherited in the past, I wish the original devs were a bit more verbose. Then again, with every developer using LLMs now, probably the opposite applies now.
You could also use plain markdown files, any free Markdown editor/IDE, and git, and sync with a remote Git repo using gcrypt for encryption (git-remote-gcrypt).
It's just a bit of a pain to set up, and also, not mobile-friendly.
The 2% of cases when you need the commit log (or more importantly: someone else who inherits your code...) justifies writing good messages imho.
If you make a change to your codebase, normally you know what you want to achieve and why (otherwise... what are you even doing?). A commit message is just putting that in writing... that only takes a few seconds, often less than it takes to write the code.
So it's just a good habit to have. It forces you to think more about the changes you do & why, so it makes you a better software developer. Creating any new habit always takes some energy initially, but it's worth it.
Cool, but I wonder... is this really a feasible workflow?
The way I use LLMs is, I enter a very specific query, and then I check the output, meticulously reviewing both the visual output and the code before I proceed. Component by component, piece by piece.
Otherwise, if you just "let it rip", I find that errors compound, and what you get isn't reliable, isn't what you intended, increases technical debt, or is just straight up dangerous.
So how can you do this from a smartphone? Don't you need your editor, and a way to run your code to review it carefully, before you can provide further input to Claude Code? Basically, how can you iterate from a phone?
It definitely makes me lose interest and trust in software that is openly described as being "vibe-coded".
I'm with the vibe of wanting to move on to the point where LLMs are just yet another tool in the process of software engineering, and not the main focus.
I'm sure that would work out fine. Just like the GDPR regulation made the web so much better & more private, and the promise of the AI act is boosting innovation in Europe...
The GDPR regulation is great and arguably does make the web more private and better. At the very least, it's better than having no regulations.
I've even been able to successfully use it to remove something private about me from the internet. I don't think I would have even gotten a response had there been no legal precedent.
You can always argue about how some regulations are badly implemented or incomplete but I believe it would be very misguided to believe that no regulations are instead the better alternative.
Exactly. So many local first libs don't cover this that it makes me wonder if the applications I am typically working on are so fundamentally different from what the local-first devs are normally building?
Most apps have user data that needs to be (partially or fully) shielded from other users. Yet, most local-first libs neglect to explain how to implement this with their libraries, or sometimes it's an obscure page or footnote somewhere in their docs, as if this is just an afterthought...
It's definitely quite a hard engineering problem to solve, if you try to cover a wide range of use cases, and layer on top of that things like permissions/authorization and scalability
Radar-based device for measuring athlete sprint & agility tests.
A lot of professional sports clubs, S&C coaches, etc.. use timing gates for measuring sprints, but those are a pain to set up, only capture split times, and are expensive. I think radar (+ optional video overlay) provides a far superior solution.
Like the OP said, it's incredible how polarizing this debate is. When I read comments like yours, I feel like a significant part of the global workforce in IT must be living on another planet? Or they never really used Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, ... intensively before because of company policies?
I legitimately am at least 10x more productive than a year ago, and I can prove it in number of commits and finished monetizable features developed per day. Obviously my workflows still very much require an active, constantly context-switching human-in-the-loop, but to me there's absolutely no question both output volume & quality have skyrocketed.