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It only puts 90% of developers out of a job if the demand for software stays flat.

Exactly. I see software engineering going the way of accounting or lawyer.

Every business needs an accountant and a lawyer on hand. In the past, hiring one software engineer to build custom software for your small or midsized business was not worth it. What can one software engineer build? Maybe an MVP in a year? No chance it was worth it for the vast majority of businesses. Outside of corporations or tech companies, employing a software dev was simply not a thing.

Nowadays, your kindergarten might employ a full time or part time software engineer to build custom software. One dev can build a lot more a lot faster.

That said, I think the average or below average dev won’t earn $200k/year anymore. However, the top devs will earn more than ever. If AI increases an average dev’s productivity by 10x, then it will increase a top tier dev’s by 100x.


“ However, the top devs will earn more than ever. ”

No they won’t. Productivity does not determine the wage rate.


It’s already happening. Top tier devs have two ways of earning way more than before:

1. They can build and sell their own products or services. We are already seeing 1-2 person software companies earning real money. Top devs don’t have to stay in corporate if they think they can generate more revenue on their own.

2. When companies get rid of their B devs without losing productivity, they can pay their A devs more.

I’m in the #2 camp right now. My team shrank by 50% through attrition in the last year. We didn’t hire anyone new when someone left. My pay has increased.


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I’m not desperate at all. It was my company who was desperate to keep me and gave me a huge pay rise. I was already making top tier money.

I threatened to leave to start my own company unless they gave me enough money to make me not want to do it. They did.


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Don't think I need pity from a random person on the internet. ;)

Regardless, I didn't say "many". I said top tier. How you define that is up to you.

There is already ample evidence for top dev talent earning way more than before whether it's through corporate or starting their own company.


Your company might fail then. Because I won’t be fighting to work at your company, I’ll just compete with your company and get paid what I deserve.

We already have CEOs is vendors trying to scare people away from vibe coding their contract away, while I diligently vibe code their contract away.

Not much new here as my entire career has been coding away 3rd party contracts, and it’s now easier than ever.


The whole point is that the company doesnt need you if there is ample supply of developers

My point is that there isn't/won't be an ample supply of developers.

It does, in the higher echelons of performance / seniority.

Junior wages won’t change, and may even get lower.

But, at least at present, the top devs are earning more than ever as their skills are much more leveraged.

I don’t see that changing anytime soon.


curious as to why

most top swe comp comes from equity in the company, which benefits from productivity

not only that but the leveraged nature of swe means top performers are in perpetual shortage and low performers contribute negative productivity

anecdotally weve seen comp rise as the best candidates have multiple competing offers as well as the freedom to start their own business


Because companies can hire one great Dev for $300k instead of 5 mediocre ones for $150k each and get better results.

That supports my point right?

Top devs make more than before


Yes. I agreed with your point.

> “ However, the top devs will earn more than ever. ”

The AI companies will skim all the extra profits.


It's even better than accounting or lawyers, because good software engineers can build incredible businesses from scratch instead of being tied to the number of businesses that exist

SWEs are more leveraged than ever and we've seen comp drastically rise for top performers


Because there is so much money for kindergarten teachers, paying an extra salary for a software dev for every kindergarten will certainly lead to better outcomes. The computer programs will make up for the lost teacher economically by teaching the children instead of people, raising the market share of my local kindergarten, or enticing people to have more babies. \s

How much does the appetite for good* software need to grow to not have loss of jobs?

> It only puts 90% of developers out of a job if the demand for software stays flat.

...or if there's an increase of demand for software, but mostly of the kind that can be completely automated by AI, no need for developers.


Love sourcehut and want to see them succeed, but their build service (despite having some very cool ideas like allowing you to SSH into your build container) is pretty barebones / lacking compared to GH/GitHub actions. You either get no task parallelism (all your tasks are in one manifest) or you get up to N=4 parallelism (you have four manifests). As far as I can tell, you can’t specify job dependencies beyond just “when this job finishes, trigger this next job by deploying a manifest”. No build caching, and artifact sharing felt like a kludge.


OTOH, the nice thing about a minimalist build system is it forces you to solve these problems yourself, in a way that’s broadly compatible with any provider: for me, nix builds, cache with cachix, and use gnu parallel for running concurrent jobs.

Means that my CI pipeline can be ~instantly moved to any provider, or a box that I own, or whatever.


Yep. I cannot imagine any universe where I'd rather use GitHub Actions than a shell script.


Doesn't the high quantity of boilerplate pollute the context, thereby making agents less useful over time? i.e. go is not "token efficient"


Language models need redundancy (as informing structure). Not surprising, since they're trained on human language. It's hard to train a model on a language with a high entropy. I haven't tried it, but I think LLMs would perform quite badly on languages such as APL, where structure and meaning are closely intertwined.


Gwern hosts a lot of PDFs -- see https://gwern.net/archiving


I guess that makes sense in the light of her previous post and work on making a new archiving solution for being able to host singlefile archives more efficiently.

Thank you



her?


Been meaning to cancel nitro and move off to Matrix or something, thanks for the push Discord!


Publishing ffmpeg and QEMU in a five year span that also included winning IOCCC (twice!) is absolutely bonkers.


Two excellent changes after ten wonderful years. Thanks for everything Eric! Cheers to many more


It's worse. Attention is all we have.


I heard somewhere it was all you need


It's because their main business (ads, tracking) makes infinite money so it doesn't matter what all the other parts of the business do, are, or if they work or not.


That's Google's main business too, they have infinite money plus 50% relative to meta, and they are still in the top two for AI


Google are well-known, like Meta, for making products that never achieve any kind of traction, and are cancelled soon after launch.

I don't know about anyone else, but I've never managed to get Gemini to actually do anything useful (and I'm a regular user of other AI tools). I don't know what metric it gets into the top 2 on, but I've found it almost completely useless.


I agree they aren't building great user products anymore but gemini is solid (maybe because it's more an engineering/data achievement than a ux thing? the user controls are basically a chat window).

I asked for a deep research about a topic and it really helped my understanding backed with a lot of sources.

Maybe it helps that their search is getting worse, so Gemini looks better in comparison. But nowadays even kagi seems worse.


Kagi has their own AI assistant that let's you choose any model from the major, and some not so major, providers. You can even hop between them I the same chat. It is also able to search for results using Kagi. This includes any lenses you could configure.

It's worked extremely well for me. Their higher subscription was less than ChatGPT + Kagi. I haven't used Gemini on its own interface yet to compare, though.


In what ways does Kagi seem worse? Any specific examples?


Please share an example. Your 'almost completely useless' claim runs counter to any model benchmark you could choose.


I'm not the person you're responding to, but I feel I have a great example. Replacing the Google Assistant with Gemini has made my phone both slower and less accurate. More than once have I said "Hey Google, Play <SONG> by <ARTIST>" and had my phone will chirp back the song is available for streaming instead of just playing it. Once, I even had it claim it wasn't capable of playing music, I assume because that's true on other platforms.


The most spectacular failure was when I asked it to make a logo for a project. The project has "cogs" in the title but that refers to Cost of Goods Sold not the physical object, so I specified that it should not include a cog a in the logo. Of course, it included a cog in the logo.

I asked it to help me create a business plan. Partway through it switched to Indonesian language, for no reason I could see. Then, after about two hours work on the plan, with about 200K tokens in the context, it stopped outputting anything reasonable.

I have tried to get it to help with Google Sheets formulae about a dozen times so far. Not once has it actually got anything right. Not once.

It's serviceable as a chatbot, but completely useless if you try to get it to actually do anything.


Gemini just eclipsed ChatGPT to be #1 on the Apple app store for these kinds of apps. The 2.5 pro series is also good/SOTA at coding, but unfortunately poorly trained for the agentic workflows that have become predominant.


Annoying to boot


Haven't Google also famously faked a phone call with an AI some years ago for an event?

https://www.axios.com/2018/05/17/google-ai-demo-questions


> When you call a business, the person picking up the phone almost always identifies the business itself (and sometimes gives their own name as well). But that didn't happen when the Google assistant called these "real" businesses:

That's the whole argument?


No, because if you read the article you'd see that there's more, like the "business" not asking for customer information or the PR people being cagey when asked for details/confirmation.


Where would one get started with PHP without picking up Laravel or Drupal?



Every PHP file can work without frameworks. The route is your filename, PHP by itself can do templating and input data is handled by the super globals.

But if you want some small and simple framework as guidance you can also try out Slim Framework.



<3


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