So you'll buy the supplements I'm selling? They'll cure everything that ails you, I promise ;-)

I disagree and I think the distinction is what we mean by "helpful in software engineering".

Is Fable helpful in that it can write some code that does what I told it to do? Yes, obviously. I don't think anyone is arguing that, because it's trivial to see that if you tell a frontier model to do a coding task, it usually does it well enough.

Is Fable helpful in that over the span of six months of using it, the codebase and my brain's relation to it is in a better state than if I had not used it? Well, I don't know. In this case I understand the code less, and the code is probably in a poor state, but it is further along in the feature list. Whether that tradeoff is a net benefit to whatever metric you care about is debatable.

I think most will agree that the extreme case in which you understand zero and the codebase is spaghetti (true vibecoding), but it has a bunch of features, is not good for most professional contexts, because we have seen this results in a high bugrate and eventual loss of trust in the tool and inability for the AI to maintain invariants due to context size.

So somewhere on the spectrum between no-AI and vibecoding is probably ideal. Where on the spectrum is the argument, and everyone is going to have their own opinions based on their own domains. I don't see this as anyone being wrong or emotional.

1. Does this make money

2. Does this warrant the unsubsidized cost of AI?

3. Does this justify the harmful externalities of AI?

I don't need personal anecdotes. I want evidence that organisations make more money, get more efficient (and so on) due to AI. Please cite a paper.

Not at all. And to be honest, I don't hear the original author asserting that all AI will go away.

But if you have a ChatGPT plan and OpenAI is bought by another company (because they are insolvent) ... do you honestly think you will be able to continue using your service without a significant price increase?

Internet existed before dot com bubble.

Right, I didn't mention anything about profit or debt.

The question is whether this is a bubble that's going away - whether "AI will just be turned off". A revenue trajectory indicating a vast increase in actual consumer/enterprise usage every year indicates otherwise. This is true regardless of whether or not forward-looking investment becomes too much at some point. If CSPs or AI labs have bought more compute than they can sell at current prices, maybe they'll go bust, but at that point supply and demand mean compute and therefore AI inference becomes much cheaper, which is unlikely to make it go away.