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

@gregkh I doubt something like this will happen.

Especially because I don't think serious devs want to slow themselves down by using LLMs.

I think LLMs will help kill the companies quicker that look for easy fixes and don't listen to their domain experts.

But for sure LLM companies have to come up with better marketing, soon. I think fewer and fewer people are believing their narrative.

@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 There is a bunch of case law that's established that nothing created by a machine can be copyrighted. My understanding is that book publishers are putting boilerplate in their contract stating that LLMs cannot be used in the production of works for them, as otherwise it opens up the possibility that someone could rip off a novel and they'd not have the protection of copyright law to sue. I've also heard of authors switching composition software to avoid even the implication of LLM taint.

@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 And it creates a new golden age of flawed software for hackers to exploit.

Hacks get bigger, data losses swell, banks are hit and lose money in six, eight, ten, twelve digit figures.

We can but dream

@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.