Saving money on tokens isn't something that's rewarded during performance reviews; particularly because it's difficult to quantify how much you saved versus hypothetically using a more expensive model.
Churning out useful code quickly is not solved by using more tokens per unit time. Most non-technical leaders can grasp this one and are likely more interested in the strategic game theoretical dynamics that are being forced by way of implied token consumption expectations (competition between developers).
If you want to hold out as long as possible and don't really care about anything other than the compensation package, you should at least play along with this new game in a half-assed manner. Try to goldilocks your token usage between any established extremes. You want to be in the statistical barycenter of every AI report that management can create.
And the tragedy is that this isn't sustainable, and we all involved deeply in tech know this. There is eventually going to be a big reality check the companies will have to pay, because you can't force creativity and quality, not even with AI, because actual intelligence lies with us at least for now and for the foreseeable future. However when the rope eventually snaps these executives at best will fall upwards, with big severance bonuses and a list of "contributions" we have to be grateful for. We are the ones that will suffer through the next big layoffs.
the companies will have to pay, because you can't force creativity and quality
Exemple from one of the wealthiest company in existance, for one of its most strategic product: I was trying gemini-cli on some mcp servers just yesterday, with gemini-chat helping me configuring everything. In less than 10 minutes, I stumbled upon 3 or 4 different bugs. Eventually, even gemini-chat recommended that I throw gemini-cli in the bin and move on to another agent... That's the new norm.
Have you seen the state of current corp software? I'd say a lot of creativity is still very much needed. Let's see how long this is sustainable.
> would anybody be really sad if this work is overtaken by LLMs?
I'd not be sad about the job itself, but the dev which had a mortgage to pay but now is substituted by a machine churning crap code while their superiors get sore from patting themselves on the back.
In cost per line of code, we have verified this is always an error unless your time is worth less than the machine (unlikely unless you consider your time to have no cost rather than considering it as your hourly rate).
The worst thing for our productivity has been Claude Code or Claude Cowork taking a complex problem and turning around and writing bad instructions for dumb model agents then synthesizing the dumb answers into an orchestra of badness.
The single best fix for results-per-total-cost is to ensure it reads and thinks about whole content, not snippets, and thinks with the smartest model, not agents.
Agents should toil. Agents should neither think*, nor decide what to think about which itself is thinking.
* Agents should “think” like ants or bees or beavers think. Any human-like thinking, *especially* intuition-like thinking, should be thought by the best model available.
** Nobody should be “churning out code”. In a hierarchy of coders who translate detailed specs to some computer language, developers who write software that ships on a project timeline, and engineers who accomplish business goals, engineers should “churn out” engines structured for business outcomes.
Measured by that, the machine is leverage while reducing a variety of costs. At the same time, because most training data doesn't grok this, the machine doesn't grok it either. So it needs you to shape its toil.
The whole industry is adjusting to the reality that the expected output of an engineer is much higher than it used to be. It’s not local to one company. You may find a better environment for the time being, but this is the direction everything is headed.
But I'd agree that everyone can start planning a career shift that'll span a few months to some years in order to seek better working conditions. Passively accepting all work degradation because that's life and money is needed is partly responsible for the current situation too.
Coding faster leads to less understanding and higher long-term risk. Source-Code amnesia is real, and there’s a time requirement to really understand and appreciate what a system is actually doing.
I’ve been able to implement very large features using frontier models, but the code needs to always be revisited.
AI can do two things: find vulnerabilities, and prototype code. It cannot design software, and any appearance of such is an illusion at best.
We don’t need to produce faster to be successful, we need to create better, long lasting products.
Copilot switches to API pricing starting next month (let's see how long it will last for our $39, and $19 since September), Anthropic switches all corps into API based pricing. From the most popular choices I think only Codex didn't switch yet (although it is hard to tell because I don't know their enterprise pricing).
Consumer sentiment is in the gutters certainly. But objective measures of the economy like unemployment and real wages look good to excellent
When you consider that xAI's old data center was enough to bring Anthropic back ahead, it tells me Microsoft could host their own on underutilized previous gen GPUs that are sitting there wasting server real estate.