All coding agents are geared towards optimizing one metric, more or less, getting people to put out more tokens — or $$$.

If these agents moved towards a policy where $$$ were charged for project completion + lower ongoing code maintenance cost, moving large projects forward, _somewhat_ similar to how IT consultants charge, this would be a much better world.

Right now we have chaos monkey called AI and the poor human is doing all the cleanup. Not to mention an effing manager telling me you now "have" AI push 50 Features instead of 5 in this cycle.

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ilaksh 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They are not optimized to waste tokens. That is absolutely ridiculous. All of the LLM providers have been struggling from day one to meet demand. They are not trying to provide outputs that create more demand.

In fact, for example, Opus 4.5 does seem to use fewer tokens to solve programming problems.

If you don't like cleaning up the agent output, don't use it?

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kace91 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>this would be a much better world.

Would it?

We’d close one of the few remaining social elevators, displace higher educated people by the millions and accumulate even more wealth at the top of the chain.

If LLMs manage similar results to engineers and everyone gets free unlimited engineering, we’re in for the mother of all crashes.

On the other hand, if LLMs don’t succeed we’re in for a bubble bust.

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itissid 10 hours ago | parent [-]

> Would it?

As compared to now. Yes. The whole idea is that if you align AI to human goals of meeting project implementation + maintenance only then can it actually do something worthwhile. Instead now its just a bunch of of middle managers yelling you to do more and laying off people "because you have AI".

If projects getting done a lot of actual wealth could be actually generated because lay people could implement things that go beyond the realm of toy projects.

	▲	hn_acc1 8 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You think that you will be ALLOWED to continue to use AI for free once it can create a LOT of wealth? Or will you have to pay royalties? The rich CEOs don't want MORE competition - they want LESS competition for being rich. I'm sure they'll find a way to add a "any vibe-coded business owes us 25% royalties" clause any day now, once the first big idea makes some $$. If that ever happens. They're NOT trying to liberate "lay people" to allow them to get rich using their tech, and they won't stand for it.
	▲	kace91 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>If projects getting done a lot of actual wealth could be actually generated because lay people could implement things that go beyond the realm of toy projects. Suppose LLMs create projects in the way you propose (and they don’t rug pull, which would already be rare). Why do you think that would generate wealth for laymen? Look at music or literature, now everyone can be on Spotify or Amazon. The result has been an absolute destruction of the wealth that reaches any author, who are buried in slop. The few that survive do so by putting 50 times more dedication into marketing than they do to the craft, any author is full time placing their content in social networks or paying to collab with artists just to be seen. This is not an improvement for anyone. Professionals no longer make a living, laypeople have a skill that’s now useless due to offer and demand, and the sea of content favors those already positioned to create visibility - the already rich.