alt Hacker News> It is so clear that AI tools will be (and are already) a big part of future jobs for CS majors now, both in industry and academia.
No, it's not.
Nothing around AI past the next few months to a year is clear right now.
It's very, very possible that within the next year or two, the bottom falls out of the market for mainstream/commercial LLM services, and then all the Copilot and Claude Code and similar services are going to dry up and blow away. Naturally, that doesn't mean that no one will be using LLMs for coding, given the number of people who have reported their productivity increasing—but it means there won't be a guarantee that, for instance, VS Code will have a first-party integrated solution for it, and that's a must-have for many larger coding shops.
None of that is certain, of course! That's the whole point: we don't know what's coming.
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I get a slow-but-usable ~10tk/s on kimi 2.5 2b-ish quant on a high end gaming slash low end workstation desktop (rtx 4090, 256 gb ram, ryzen 7950). Right now the price of RAM is silly but when I built it it was similar in price to a high end macbook - which is to say it isn’t cheap but it’s available to just about everybody in western countries. The quality is of course worse than what the bleeding edge labs offer, especially since heavy quants are particularly bad for coding, but it is good enough for many tasks: an intelligent duck that helps with planning, generating bog standard boilerplate, google-less interactive search/stackoverflow ("I ran flamegraph and X is an issue, what are my options here?” etc).
My point is, I can get somewhat-useful ai model running at slow-but-usable speed on a random desktop I had lying around since 2024. Barring nuclear war there’s just no way that AI won’t be at least _somewhat_ beneficial to the average dev. All the AI companies could vanish tomorrow and you’d still have a bunch of inference-as-a-service shops appearing in places where electricity is borderline free, like Straya when the sun is out.
I agree with you that everything is changing and that we don’t know what’s coming, but I think you really have to stretch things to imagine that it’s a likely scenario that AI-assisted coding will “dry up and blow away.” You’ll need to elaborate on that, because I don’t think it’s likely even if the AI investment bubble pops. Remember that inference is not really that expensive. Or do you think that things shift on the demand side somehow?
It is clear that AI had already transformed how we do our jobs in CS
The genie is out of the bottle, never going back
It's a fantasy to think it will "dry up" and go away
Some other guarantees over the next few years we can make based on history: AI will get batter, faster, and more efficient like everything else in CS