There’s many facets to it, including token costs, the risk of captured markets, more “win more” economics.

Right now, this stuff is insanely cheap as a solo dev who isn’t making a bunch of autonomous agent API calls. Nearly all my interactions are working with an agent to make a game or project. I’m not attempting to, nor interested in, yet another AI service based company.

I work at a reasonable pace, usually 1 conversation is my focus with actual work, whereas another agent may be doing research or documentation. Too many things in motion turns into a mess to test or validate. Solve one issue at a time. I don’t hit token limits, and I’m making good progress.

When I read stories of people being inefficient or wasteful, yeah, that’s sad, don’t do that. I feel reasonably efficient & the cost is really low (for me/lifestyle). I use the $20/mon Claude subscription for my personal.

I understand what you’re saying, but you’re talking about real world examples rather than the mechanics at play.

Let’s said you have the best engineer in the world. They are fantastic as describing nuanced, complex ideas. The fastest they can write is about 300 words per minute. The fastest they can read is 1200 words per minute.

Put them up against an AI model. They write at 6000 wpm & read at like 11 mil or something ridiculous.

Now, you’re making the argument, “Speed isn’t everything!” and that’s true. Which would rather you have, though: the same engineer, the AI, or the same engineer using the AI? I’d argue you’d rather have them both, because you have someone who can describe what they want in depth, they can point it towards heuristics or targets, and they can setup evals or governance strategies to better control the output.

I’m not trying to be dismissive, but I work with competent, smart people. My experiences have been the opposite. 🤷

I’m a game developer of 14 years. It is not “the best thing to happen.” However, it is providing significant benefit in a low risk environment to make projects insanely fast.

While AI art may have a stigma, and rightfully so, I don’t see a future where humans write code manually as a regular occurrence. I expect the majority of code will be AI written. There’s a number of reasons why, and I’ve talked about this elsewhere on lemmy & .ml. I think the toothpaste is out, and it’s not going back in, at least here.

I really wish people would change this conversation to “How do we/society get our just deserts from this situation?” Rather than “IT’S ALL BAD.” They stole all our stuff. They’ve admitted to it. Okay, tech bros, then it’s the tools of the people. Or we get money back, especially so if you live near a data center.

I’ve been able to make prototypes of projects I’ve dreamt about in an insanely short time at pretty low costs. That’s good enough for me.