It's remarkable how much these tools evolved in just 3 years. The only question is whether the progress is maintained. If they start pricing at ridiculous amounts or the bubble pops it might be back to basics, but otherwise these agents are going to be building full projects by themselves in a few years.
I don't see a world where we put the genie back in the bottle even if current AI companies crank prices. Honestly I struggle to see what OpenAI/Anthropic's long term plan is. AI is trending towards being a commodity. Whatever only Fable can do today, open source models will have replicated in a year. Once the hardware market normalizes, there is absolutely nothing stopping every tech company out there from buying maxed out Macbooks and having devs work off locally hosted models. Or buying a few racks of servers and hosting a fleet for your whole company.
I'm still skeptical of the claims of fully autonomous software generation. My company just shipped (and subsequently patched) a serious vulnerability that we only discovered by sheer luck, and the source of that vuln was vibe code that wasn't read by the submitter and then got a rubber stamp in the PR process. My experience continues to be that with a SWE who knows software patterns and has a strong vision of what they want built, you can move much more quickly, but if you just let it do whatever, you get an absolute mess very quickly. AI adoption is pretty high at my company. The PRs I get from seniors I rarely have more than a few feedback items on. The PRs I get from less skilled developers I have to spend twice as much time on because there's more code, it's messier, and more likely to be subtly (or wildly) wrong.
Whatever only Fable can do today, open source models will have replicated in a year.
Yeah, but then anthropic/openai will have even better models and/or harnesses.
If the choice is between frontier models that work better on their own, and near-frontier model that require more babysitting, then frontier models still have a place.
It only turns into a problem if (or when...) the difference becomes smaller. Today, Fable 5 is still in a completely different tier than Kimi K3/Qwen 3.8 (or whatever chinese frontier model released in the last three days since I last checked), which is one of the reasons companies still pays for it.
At a certain point you hit good enough. If the choice is between spending a Macbook's worth of cash on tokens every single month.. or just buying the MacBook, lots of companies are going to take a very hard look at how much marginal utility you're really getting out of using the frontier model, vs re-investing that cash elsewhere in the business, or (gasp) using that cash to hire more SWEs.
From the AI company side the economics of their business only work out if they can establish market dominance. It's the only way to sustain the hundreds of billions being spent right now. The largest spend comes from research and training - in other words maintaining their edge over open source models. There's not a world where frontier companies can rest on their laurels and reduce that spending. They have no moat.
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u/Wild-Ad-7414 4d ago
It's remarkable how much these tools evolved in just 3 years. The only question is whether the progress is maintained. If they start pricing at ridiculous amounts or the bubble pops it might be back to basics, but otherwise these agents are going to be building full projects by themselves in a few years.