Good article and comments! It paints quite good picture of the current narrative around tokenmaxxing and replacing human engineers with agents.
https://www.404media.co/startups-brag-they-spend-more-money-on-ai-than-human-employees/
"The industry has become obsessed with the idea of a “one-person, billion-dollar company,” and various AI startups and venture capital firms are now trying to push founders to try to create “autonomous” companies that have few or no employees."
"[Replacing software engineers with coding agents] will probably work as long as AI providers are taking a bath on their models, but what happens when all your "employees" ask for a 10x pay raise simultaneously? did tech bros reinvent the union from first principles?"
"Investors have decided that the future is agents! So you must make your system a series of agents! Even if there are much simpler ways to do it, and even ways that don't use LLMs.
The reason for that, of course, is that VCs believe that if you have an AI agent that can do a human job, you can charge for the software like it was a human service (e.g. charging $10k/month rather than $100/month), which they would obviously love."
"Given that Claude Code is reportedly writing 70-90% of the code for its own next version, there are clearly use cases where it's working out. I would read this more as industry transformation growing pains--a transition period where overexcited people are figuring out the hard way where this works and where it doesn't."
"[A] few of us end up writing the fixes for systemic issues and core pieces of code by hand while the LLM experts iterate quickly on surface bugs. It's similar to how we used to divide work between senior and junior coders, except with the downside that the LLM will never graduate past junior coder level no matter how much training it receives."
"I have librarian colleagues who never coded before who have used it successfully to write things like format conversion scripts. These are cases where without AI assistance, the thing just wouldn't get done at all-- their library wouldn't hire a programmer to do this stuff even without the freeze--but it's a huge boon to suddenly be able to make all these old historical records compliant with a modern catalog standard, or other activities along those lines."