This is one of the clearest takes I've seen that starts to get me to the point of possibly being able to trust code that I haven't reviewed.
The whole idea of letting an AI write tests was problematic because they're so focused on "success" that `assert True` becomes appealing. But orchestrating teams of agents that are incentivized to build, and teams of agents that are incentivized to find bugs and problematic tests, is fascinating.
I'm quite curious to see where this goes, and more motivated (and curious) than ever to start setting up my own agents.
Question for people who are already doing this: How much are you spending on tokens?
That line about spending $1,000 on tokens is pretty off-putting. For commercial teams it's an easy calculation. It's also depressing to think about what this means for open source. I sure can't afford to spend $1,000 supporting teams of agents to continue my open source work.
At that point, outside of FAANG and their salaries, you are spending more on AI than you are on your humans. And they consider that level of spend to be a metric in and of itself. I'm kinda shocked the rest of the article just glossed over that one. It seems to be a breakdown of the entire vision of AI-driven coding. I mean, sure, the vendors would love it if everyone's salary budget just got shifted over to their revenue, but such a world is absolutely not my goal.
And it might be the tokens will become cheaper.
Assuming 20 working days a month: that's 20k x 12 == 240k a year. So about a fresh grad's TC at FANG.
Now I've worked with many junior to mid-junior level SDEs and sadly 80% does not do a better job than Claude. (I've also worked with staff level SDEs who writes worse code than AI, but they offset that usually with domain knowledge and TL responsibilities)
I do see AI transform software engineering into even more of a pyramid with very few human on top.
I wonder what the security teams at companies that use StrongDM will think about this.
My hunch is that the thing that's going to matter is network effects and other forms of soft lockin. Features alone won't cut it - you need to build something where value accumulates to your user over time in a way that discourages them from leaving.
If I launch a new product, and 4 hours later competitors pop up, then there's not enough time for network effects or lockin.
I'm guessing what is really going to be needed is something that can't be just copied. Non-public data, business contracts, something outside of software.
rhrthg•37m ago
simonw•27m ago
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