Because companies are betting that this spending will allow them to reduce cost by firing people.

Right now the AI LLM PRs we're seeing are just introducing more work for other people, while these so-called builders are looking good with their new dashboards and functionality they're demoing.

But you can't talk to them about the flow of the code. You can't ask them for their thinking as to why certain things are.

It's not built up from the ground with experience from x people taken into account. It's materialized from nothing, with no foundational separation, and barely any abstractions.

No one wants to touch it. The PRs are too large, and the 'authors' of the PRs aren't on call with us.

They get all the glory, but do none of the work.

It's kinda like designing a house and then sending it to an architect and engineer saying: make this work.

That's just a non sequitur. "companies are already paying thousands per seat" has zero correlation with something being a fad or not. There are much more reasonable rationales explaining why companies are acting the way they are than "because AI coding is not a fad"

I would use these exact facts as a sign that it's maybe not what it seems. It's much too big and too fast to feel stable. It might keep at that level, increase even more, or drop down to a saner level of use / allocation.

“AI coding is a fad” is not just one big camp of similar-minded people. Different groups have to give up on their pre-existing beliefs in order to be ok with AI coding.

Think of people who were very strict with variable names. People who pushed for multiple-levels deep of abstractions for a single API logic that’s not going to be reused. People who believed that coding is craft, rather than just a process to get to the end during work hours. This makes most of these people’s points more-or-less moot.

I was in some of those camps, but I’ve seen coding evolve in the last 15 years. So I understand that these priors need to be updated, as most arguments don’t apply to today’s world.

Fear of loss to competitors embracing a technology creates a fear driven adoption.

Let me ask you this: is any technology worth so much break-neck adoption without first seeing clear evidence of ROI? No. The adoption is irrational.

Because the vibe coded stuff is sometimes great, sometimes it breaks stuff, sometimes it breaks things that we fixed multiple times earlier. The PRs are too large, nobody can review that mess and you better be on call for your deployment. Maybe it will get better, maybe not. I dont know yet.

There is a whole spectrum between "ai coding is a fad" and "unlimited tokens for every employees we don't even care if it actually ends up being a net positive financially"

> Which other tool went from nothing to this level of acceptance so quickly?

NFTs? My company had nothing to do with blockchain but I ended up working on NFT integration regardless.

perhaps the personal computer? Companies were spending 3-5k (10-15k inflation adjusted) on every employee for just hardware.

everyone making comparisons to the dotcom bubble seems misguided. this is clearly computing 2.0 imo

>Why there are so many people that still believe that AI coding is a fad?

Because there's not a single piece of evidence that this has improved the quality of the delivered software, or for that matter even the speed of features any of these companies produce, in fact if anything the opposite.

The point of software development, the hint is in the name, is to develop software, not consume tokens. If Uber was now full of 10x engineers the stock price of Uber would be up, not down on a yearly basis. Hilariously enough the only company whose stock price is up appears to be Antrophic

Because writing huge amounts of code is easy for humans too. Agents already proved that they can do it. But are agents able to maintain it? I do not know and unless I know for sure, I am not fully committing to AI generated code.

i.e. I am able to write about 1k lines of code of "acceptable" quality per week. Which means in 1 year, there will be about 5Ok LoC. I am pretty sure, that I would have to spent like 60-80% of time to maintain 1st year code and the rest to make new features in the second year so I would have to hire more people and spent time to onboard them to maintain velocity. All of that are rough estimates, probably overoptimistic and way worse in 3rd year. Good luck doing such estimates with code agents. Even worse if you already have huge amounts of legacy code.

Why are there so many people who mistake simple anecdotes for actionable data? Why do the majority of businesses fail rather than succeed?

Because we have spent a lot of time and money using AI to generate code and have been unimpressed with the results.

As for why they got accepted so quickly 1) the industry's long running desperation to deskill computer programming 2) the addictive psychology baked into LLMs "That's an elegant solution! Shall I ... ?"

It's cope. People desperately want to believe that AI coding is going away so that they can go back to partying like it's 2020.

So there's a huge number of HN posters claiming that the price of tokens will go UP over time rather than down (that's how Moore's Law works, right???) or that code bases that AI contributes to will spontaneously combust, or something.