True - but if you erode that trust then your users may go elsewhere. If you keep the ads visually separated, there's a respected boundary & users may accept it.

how is it "trusted" when it just makes things up

I imagine they would be more like product placements in film and TV than banner ads. Just casually dropping a recommendation and link to Brand (TM) in a query. Like those Cerveza Cristal ads in star wars. They'll make it seem completely seamless to the original query.

Like that’s ever stopped the adtech industry before.

It would be a hilarious outcome though, “we built machine gods, and the main thing we use them for is to make people click ads.” What a perfect Silicon Valley apotheosis.

I'm not sure that stereotype holds up. Developers spend a lot: courses, cloud services, APIs, plugins, even fancy keyboards.

A quick search shows that click on ads targeting developers are expensive.

Also there is a ton of users asking to rewrite emails, create business plans, translate, etc.

> I heard majority of the users are techies asking coding questions.

Citation needed? I can't sit on a bus without spotting some young person using ChatGPT

OpenAI has half a billion active users.

You don't need every individual request to be profitable, just the aggregate. If you're doing a Google search for, like, the std::vector API reference you won't see ads. And that's probably true for something like 90% of the searches. Those searches have no commercial value, and serving results is just a cost of doing business.

By serving those unmonetizable queries the search engine is making a bet that when you need to buy a new washing machine, need a personal injury lawyer, or are researching that holiday trip to Istanbul, you'll also do those highly commercial and monetizable searches with the same search engine.

Chatbots should have exactly the same dynamics as search engines.

You'd probably do brand marketing for Stripe, Datadog, Kafka, Elastic Search etc.

You could even loudly proclaim that the are ads are not targeted by users which HN would love (but really it would just be old school brand marketing).

You sell them Copilot. You Sell them CursorAI. You sell them Windsurf. You sell them Devin. You sell the Claude Code.

Software guys are doing much, much more than treating LLM's like an improved Stack Overflow. And a lot of them are willing to pay.

…for starters, you can sell them the ability to integrate your AI platform into whatever it is they are building, so you can then sell your stuff to their customers.

A lot of people use it for cooking and other categories as well.

Techies are also great for network growth and verification for other users, and act as community managers indirectly.

According to fb's aggressively targeted marketing, you sell them donald trump propaganda.

The existence of the LLMs will themselves change the profile and proclivities of people we consider “programmers” in the same way the app-driven tech boom did. Programmers who came up in the early days are different from ones who came up in the days of the web are different from ones who came up in the app era.

It sounds quite scary that an LLM could be trained on a single source of news (specially FN).

There's another specific class of person that seems helped by them: the paralysis by analysis programmer. I work with someone really smart who simply cannot get started when given ordinary coding tasks. She researches, reads and understands the problem inside and out but cannot start actually writing code. LLMs have pushed her past this paralysis problem and given her the inertia to continue.

On the other end, I know a guy who writes deeply proprietary embedded code that lives in EV battery controllers and he's found LLMs useless.

> Can you explain this in more detail?

Not sure what GP meant specifically, but to me, if $200/m gets you a decent programmer, then $200/m is the new going rate for a programmer.

Sure, now it's all fun and games as the market hasn't adjusted yet, but if it really is true that for $200/m you can 10x your revenue, it's still only going to be true until the market adjusts!

> The competent people do get a productivity boost though.

And they are not likely to remain competent if they are all doing 80% review, 15% prompting and 5% coding. If they keep the ratios at, for example, 25% review, 5% prompting and the rest coding, then sure, they'll remain productive.

OTOH, the pipeline for juniors now seems to be irrevocably broken: the only way forward is to improve the LLM coding capabilities to the point that, when the current crop of knowledgeable people have retired, programmers are not required.

Otherwise, when the current crop of coders who have the experience retires, there'll be no experience in the pipeline to take their place.

If the new norm is "$200/m gets you a programmer", then that is exactly the labour rate for programming: $200/m. These were previously (at least) $5k/m jobs. They are now $200/m jobs.