To be fair, Gemini 3.1 flash _lite_ supports structured output (guaranteed json), it’s super fast, runs circles around 2.5 flash and costs $0.25/$1.50.
I use it _a lot_ and it’s very capable if you just plan correctly. I actually almost exclusively use 3.1 flash lite and 2.5 flash lite (even cheaper) and we have 99.5% accuracy in what we do.
That said, I think we’ll see the lite/flash models and the pro models will diverge more price wise. The pro models will become more and more expensive.
To me, LLM's free up time for me so that I can spend time on the fun parts of coding. Less boilerplate, more focus on the interesting problems. This is no different from using high level languages. The problem domain is less around memory management and garbage collection and closer to the problem you're actually trying to solve.
Good tooling, high level languages, faster computers and sane standards also enabled enormous productivity gains. I predict very few positions lost to LLM's, rather I'd say that just with any technical "revolution" we'll just set a new baseline for productivity, get rid of some bottlenecks, and have a new situation where we need even more engineers to maintain upkeep.
Most jobs lost to AI is just companies that want / need to lay people off and shareholders like "Replaced 30% of our workforce with AI" more than any other conceivable reason.
I recently wrote a blog post about exactly this, and I agree with your perspective. Vibe coding helps with showing other people your idea and get them to understand it, try it and, most importantly, help you fail fast. But as the product matures, the gains of using LLM's and agentic engineering will go from 10000% efficiency to something like maybe 30(?)% productivity gain? Which is still awesome, of course.
"The real test of Vibe coding is whether people will finally realize the cost of software development is in the maintenance, not in the creation."
For me personally, both at work and in my free time, I spend _more_ time on writing things _that matter_ since I’ve freed up time by using LLM’s for boilerplate tasks.
My motto is - If it wasn’t worth writing, it won’t be worth reading.
A good example of writing where I’d recommend using LLM’s is product documentation. You pass the diff, the description of the task, and the context (existing documentation) with a prompt ”Update the documentation…”.
Documentation is important but it’s not prose. However, writing a comment on hacker news is.
I guess one big component is perceived value. If the market thinks it’s valuable, it’s valuable. It’s when when the market looses value and/or interest that the true value will be evaluated. Companies that have grown organically don’t have that issue since they have proven themselves over time. It’s different for VC’s, for good and bad I guess.
Yes. But the exploitable vector in this case is still humans. AI is just a tool.
The non-deterministic nature of an LLM can also be used to catch a lot of attacks. I often use LLM’s to look through code, libraries etc for security issues, vulnerabilities and other issues as a second pair of eyes.
With that said, I agree with you. Anything can be exploited and LLM’s are no exception.
"IBM Bob is IBM’s new coding agent, currently in Closed Beta. "
Promptarmor did a similar attack(1) on Google's Antigravity that is also a beta version. Since then, they added secure mode(2).
These are still beta tools. When the tools are ready, I'd argue that they will probably be safer out of the box compared to a whole lot of users that just blindly copy-paste stuff from the internet, adding random dependencies without proper due diligence, etc. These tools might actually help users acting more secure.
I'm honestly more worried about all the other problems these tools create. Vibe coded problems scale fast. And businesses have still not understood that code is not an asset, it's a liability. Ideally, you solve your business problems with zero lines of code. Code is not expensive to write, it's expensive to maintain.
It’s interesting how you end up being a part of the current trends whether you know it or not.
I actually set up a blog on the 15th. No real content yet but I’ve almost written a first real post. Seeing this made me chuckle - I thought _I_ had an original thought around missing blogs but I’m obviously just a part of the hive mind. I truly hope this trend is here to stay.
I also want to share this video on the topic ”The reason no one has hobbies anymore”, it was shared by a podcast I was listening to the other day and I think it’s well worth watching. https://youtu.be/IUhGoNTF3FI
Also the burn in the beginning of EWD899 (not transcribed) is noteworthy:
A review of a paper in AI.
I read "Default Reasoning as Likelihood Reasoning" by Elaine Rich. (My copy did not reveal where it had been published; the format suggests some conference proceedings. If that impression is correct, I am glad I did not attend the conference in question.