Prediction for the potential future:

When the AI coding agent companies are just about to run out of money, down to their last few % raised as none of their customers are actually paying the real cost required to run these services, they pivot and take all of the uploaded code that was willingly sent to them, turn it into thousands of products / services to sell / rent, disconnect the public api endpoints leaving their old customers helpless as they no longer remember how to program "in the raw" and can not understand their own codebases, and compete directly against them putting their own customers all out of business which finally results in a positive income stream and "validation" of the coding agent companies previously over-hyped business valuations.

"But copyright law will prevent this!" you say...

@gregkh yup, this.

@gregkh

But copyright law will prevent this!

copyright law protects the wealthy. in many juristictions, individuals cannot realistically win copyright lawsuits

@sysedit @gregkh It's hard to avoid it these days, a lot of IDE's have replaced Intellisense (and similar) with LLM's...

@gregkh The same copyright law that is so meticulously applied during AI training?

@gregkh Once you learn to rugpull, everything looks like a rug.

I guess it would make sense that there is a big overlap between cryptocoin and 'AI' bros.

@gregkh And making for fat paychecks for all the veteran engineers who can offer an alternative to doing business with the guys who just screwed you over.

@gregkh
I'd hope so. Alas it's far more easy to take big money in return for having your chatbot tell people that socialism is bad and climate change a hoax.

@gregkh You're basically making the singularity argument, which is what the AI people do think they'll achieve. Except you're saying that instead of the machines becoming smarter it's the humans will become stupider. Interesting thought.

@gregkh IMO they’ll simply jack the prices way up for any customer who’s locked-in, in a final attempt to boost revenue. At that point, customers would either disengage and survive, pay, or die.

Businesses that leveraged too much on the hype will go tits up. Same goes for the providers, if customers stop paying it will be the end of the road.

It’s not going to be pretty.

@gregkh my dad wants to get Claude code and is asking me to "try" it too.

My response:

@gregkh While I agree that coding skill decline and technical debt growth from AI coding is real, Big Tech's burn rate is much higher than it would need to be for this to work out - or at least I hope so.

@gregkh this is the day i am living for rn

@gregkh @jwz Code without context has little to no value. They’re holding lots of raw data but turning it into usable market intelligence would be real work.

@fivetonsflax @gregkh @jwz exactly.

> turn it into thousands of products / services to sell / rent

pretend i work for anthropic. explain to me how we would do this. obviously our customers have been failing or we wouldn't run out of money. so how could we fare any better than them?

@lritter @fivetonsflax @gregkh @jwz This is assuming current subscription prices fully cover maintenance costs, a rare thing with startups.

@mage_of_dragons @fivetonsflax @gregkh @jwz success stories are worth something too. this is assuming they should have enough subscribers to break even. but if the market is not expanding... is it really valuable what they have then?

they figure that out by raising prices and looking at how many leave. but at that point they are already cost-cutting, not diversifying into "doing it all themselves".

you'd have to hire people with a very different skillset, too.