Exactly. As soon as business works out that there are open models that can achieve parity at a fraction of the cost, they will switch model. They have to. Business exists to make money, and if they can do the same thing at lower cost, they will.
Which is why these companies must be overvalued. This is the definition of a commodity. We have no loyalty to any vendor or model, it's just about capability, price and performance and there can only be so many more increments in capability before these models are good enough that it doesn't matter which you use for 99.9 pct of tasks and the frontier moves on to robotics or the next hard domain (which OpenAI / Anthropic may not lead). I predict that in a year I'll be using whatever the latest version of Gemini flash is (because it's fast, on my mobile and multimodal), and some small cheap open SWE expert model for dev work.
'roll down hill' is a good way of putting it. They don't have 'will', but that's as we want it I think. I think alignment is harder if they develop will. Without will they are still tools that feel like an exoskeleton rather than something that will control us.
I have an freemium VS code extension that is converting well (we have 1 perpetual licence sale for every 10 VS Code market place downloads). But I'm having difficulty raising awareness of the extension (330 installs so far on https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=appsoftw...). The extension is https://www.asnotes.io - a notes / PKMS extension for VS Code that includes wikilinking, task management, a kanban board, daily journalling and static site publishing). The perpetual licence, which I feel is priced reasonably, is not enough to justify PPC ad spends to raise awareness. Developer communities like Hacker News are receptive, but you can only post about your app so many times there. Any advice on marketing this sort of app would be appreciated.
I feel like it depends on the task, and that's why people seem to disagree on this. Think about a manager managing 5 devs. If he is working on planning and managing work for his dev team, we don't say he is task switching, he's just taking a management role where he takes a high level view of the task at hand and then delegates the deep dive. Where it differs for devs is that we could in theory run multiple agents concurrently, but frequently, currently, we have to dive in and give the agents significant steers and this pulls us in to the detail. The same will happen for managers. The variables are the complexity of the task, the capability of the agent and the number of tasks. There are lots of scenarios where devs can run multiple tasks without too much mental overload, but I think what is hard is that we don't know when an agent will underperform on a task and we will get pulled back into developer mode. Maybe it's a case of running for as long as you can in manager mode and then accept that when one agent needs help, you have to single task with that agent (I think this is what makes us feel like we are the bottleneck, and that's where the feeling of stress creeps in). I thought about this a lot while working on https://www.agentkanban.io which I use to help me partition agent chats by task, run separate worktrees etc
I don't think we're going to convince anyone to replace git on speed alone. I don't spend that much time waiting for git operations, even on really big repositories.
I worked on this problem with https://www.agentkanban.io - this is a human in the loop integration for VS code that stores the context in the kanban task so it lives with the task (can also be forked, split etc).
Same. I haven't been able to see how people let agent loops run without significant steering and produce good quality software. VS Code with one or two integrated terminals running is fine for me. Or a couple of VS Code instances if I'm working one a couple of projects concurrently. The advantage of VS Code is the code / diff visibility if you like to be hands on.
It's honest - people who know what they are looking at will take speed and token costs into account. I don't use Gemini 3.5 for coding, but I use it as something in between a search engine and agent.
Git has worktrees, which provide a means of creating branch linked physical working directories. I built in UI assistance for creating worktress associated with the agent session in https://www.agentkanban.io (an agent integrated kanban board for use with copilot / claude and vs code). I agree, I would rather try and make use of a tool that the agent is already familiar with, unless it's missing features that the agent needs to achieve its goal (which git is not)
It's made me wonder the same, but most LLM generated codebases haven't been around long enough to judge maintainability. I have noticed issues in some of my more LLM heavy code when I expect a change to be replicated in multiple areas, assuming common code / styling was reused, only to find it wasn't. It's for that reason I can't use LLMs for client codebases without heavy scrutiny of every line generated (for my own hobby projects I'm a lot more lenient)
Interface over inheritance is the paradigm I try and stick to. I'd rather maintain orthogonal code than code with overuse of inheritance because of over adherence to DRY.
Self help books are the most filler heavy books. They often have a useful point, but they just don't need to be a book much of the time. This is unfortunate for the authors who have often put significant time into producing the information. Technical manuals typically need all of their content due to the level of detail, and novels need all of their content because it's the content which provides enjoyment. For self help, people just want to know what they need to do to make their lives better? Maybe the work has to move into academia where we have existing infrastructure for rewarding non profitable work for the good of the public?
For me it's about the value of my time. I think that it's important that we have open models, but for getting real work done, my time is too valuable to waste it on subpar results or additional agent management when a max plan covers all the use I need. It's not worth quibbling over. If the cost / benefit ratio changes, I'll be looking harder at local set ups, but not at the moment.