> Meeting that expectation means making LLM calls, and LLM calls cost money.

Of course, and so does everything in the software world. The point is getting the cost so low that it’s basically free. The new DS V4 Flash or the smaller Qwen3.6 models are still really expensive compared to what we were used to in the economics of software, but it’s not unreasonable to expect these costs to continue falling down.

Rough chatgpt estimate says 3-5 orders of magnitude of difference compared to a typical user interaction with a SPA (db/cache lookup, CDN…)

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throwaway27448 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> and so does everything in the software world.

Well, no. Copying is free, or so near free it makes zero sense to charge. LLMs are just papering over the damage caused by profit.

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euazOn 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, my point is that LLMs can reach that point too. Especially if you do it clientside. Copying was also way more expensive back in the 60s (accounting just for machine time and electricity, not storage cost, about 100 million times more expensive than today). Everything has a cost.

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an hour ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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throwaway27448 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

LLMs will never be as cheap or reliable as copying.

	▲	euazOn an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Definitely, of course. But I think the logic of the author’s article is based on there being a huge difference between the two, or rather a high cost of inference in absolute terms. And that can change and we have seen it change. Which breaks the entire premise of the article going forward, no? Inference will be always more expensive than db operations or copying, sure. But how much more expensive is the question.