What can your company do?
Hire some Developers?
Thirty years ago, you had an OS and you installed applications. No problem.
Later, you had to build and use apps on the internet, an infrastructure that is susceptible to DDOS attacks, government firewalls, and other security risks. Still fine, sort of.
Now, you not only have to build apps on the internet, you also have use LLMs to build apps to remain competitive with other developers. Future (human) maintainers of your code might not properly understand how it works, and if the providers of the LLMs screw up or go rogue, you are properly fucked.
There is a dependency/technology stack debt that is creating risks that need to be acknowledged.
And I know like one guy who does use them. He's not a developer by trade, he just has to write programs sometimes.
I'm not using AI coding tools yet, and even if they force me at gunpoint to use them at work no one can force me to in my spare time
I'm not too worried about the case where no one can code anymore because that will be after I'm dead
Hard to do when each individual provider wants to lock your company into multiyear enterprise contracts.
400k isn’t crazy for the FANG set but it’s still a subset of the developer market and hundreds of thousands of those jobs have been cut in the last few years as they all collectively work to lower SWE pay.
60k a year it needs to be a full irreplaceable part of the infrastructure for I think. There are very few kinds of software that meet that bar right now (certain design tools etc that have no replacement). 12k/year is in the expensive but reasonable for the right tooling category (Matlab etc.).
I don’t know what the future holds. I know the big AI companies are banking on being able to charge for a replacement SWE that works 24/7. Still not convinced these are it yet, as useful as they can be under the right circumstances.
what does someone do when a certain brand coffee maker keeps breaking; they buy a different brand.
Use an Anthropic competitor?
