| ▲ | fny 5 hours ago |
| The unit economics might be just fine. We'll know more after IPO. The drug dealer analogy has a darker side to it, however. Once your dependent, they can drive up the price just because. It doesn't need to be for existential reasons. |
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| ▲ | onion2k 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Once your dependent, they can drive up the price just because. It doesn't need to be for existential reasons. This is the crisis point for vibe-coders. A developer can go back to writing code by hand, as horrible as that might sound. Someone who hasn't learned to code but builds with AI can't go back. They either pay or they stop. That will be an painful choice whichever way you fall. |
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| ▲ | jcfrei 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There are already open weight models out there that are capable and cheap enough for a lot of coding tasks. Not as good as Claude but not far from it. There's no going back to pre-AI coding. | | |
| ▲ | SpicyLemonZest 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I can't speak for everyone, but for most of my coding tasks, Claude is just barely good enough. There's no going all the way back, and perhaps open weight models will keep improving, but at least 50% of my work would be better done by hand than by a worse-than-Claude agent. | | |
| ▲ | SwellJoe 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I consider Opus 4.5 the crossover point where coding with agents got more efficient than not coding with agents. They were too stupid before that, and wasted more time than they saved for anything beyond a basic CRUD app or HTML page. Certainly, the best models have gotten better since then, but I wouldn't consider DeepSeek V4 Pro or GLM 5.2 to be a big enough downgrade to be worse than coding by hand. I'm willing to spend a premium for the best model for coding because it wastes less of my time with dumb stuff, so I've got a Claude subscription. But, there is a limit to how much of a premium I'll pay. 10x over Chinese models? OK, fine. Opus saves me enough time to make it worth a couple hundred bucks a month. But, 100x, or more? Nah. I'll go a little slower, review the PRs a little more carefully. And, open weights models do keep improving. DeepSeek V4 Pro is a notable improvement over earlier DeepSeek models, and the first DeepSeek model to cross the "better to work with it than without it" threshold into Opus 4.5 (or better) territory. GLM 5.2 is somewhere in the ballpark of Opus 4.6 (though without vision, a notable limitation for anything that requires a UI). |
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| ▲ | jcgrillo 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | There's a secret third option: learn. At one point, all of us were "nontechnical", but we learned. The trick is to never stop. | | |
| ▲ | akazantsev 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Is it? Learning is one thing. But owning a large codebase, you see for the first time, is a completely different level. | | |
| ▲ | jcgrillo 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah giving up is totally a viable choice, but it isn't the only option. |
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| ▲ | dofm 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| All of the silent, hidden model routing OpenAI does strongly suggests that the unit economics are not just fine, at least not yet. If apparently the only way you can make money with your product this early is to dilute and adulterate it behind the scenes, it strongly suggests you want the customer to continue to believe they are getting value that you can't afford to supply. More prosaically: if either of these firms could prove that they were even really close to profitable on inference, they would have bloomin' said so while they were trying to raise more money. |
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| ▲ | JimsonYang 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The dependent idea is questionable- when your boss tells you to not use the most expesive models-you just dont I would assume when price hikes happen either
1) less non technical people would vibecode as it doesnt impact the work that much
2) people use the cheaper chinese models
3)we're jamming ai into everything because were exploring. We will just niche down into use cases that provide high roi |
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| ▲ | okr 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| AI is a worker for me. That i pay for. Basically i am in the same game now to reduce the prizes i have to pay for my workers. Just like the employers are, that seek to reduce costs for employees, as we are simply too expensive. We need more competition among the workers. Let's introduce more chinese workforce! ;) |
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| ▲ | nemomarx 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | If you had a choice of maybe 3-4 contracting firms to hire workers from and you weren't large enough to negotiate on price I think you'd be in a pet bad spot as a business? | | |
| ▲ | okr 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I would say so, yep. I just find it funny, that suddenly i am in the position to find for the cheapest option for my lovely AI workers. While usually me is the one who complains to be underpaid. I am in the same shoe as my employers now. |
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| ▲ | chrismarlow9 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'm finding it challenging to believe they wouldn't just cannibalize anything dependent on them in that way or at minimum launch a directly competing product. |
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| ▲ | airstrike 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It's a really different market, though. New entrants can easily undercut them if they price too high |
