It's just so wild to me to see otherwise risk-averse engineers run enthusiastically into the biggest vendor-lock-in grift I've ever seen.

LLM-generated code cannot be effectively worked on without LLMs. LLM-generated tickets cannot be effectively triaged without LLMs. LLM-generated documentation is not useful without LLM-based summarization. The duplication, the verbosity, the sheer inanity of extrapolation from the mean. Agentic workflows produce piles and piles of artifacts and processes that cannot be engaged with without the continued use of agents.

I wonder who that serves?

That doesn't surprise me. What surprises me is no one cares. It's fine, we don't have to consider that. If Claude changes that abstraction, it can just just rewrite those hundred multi-assertion, cross-subject tests that don't really convey what the abstraction does. Such coverage! Claude will fix a bug that it added in 5 modules across 3 repos, and it can just fix all the modules in all the repos too.

Surely, Claude wouldn't 100x in cost. Surely, this planet-eating Claude will exist forever exactly as it is in this, the peak of its VC-subsidized hype. Why on earth would you suggest otherwise?

These agents are sold by companies who are burning unfathomable piles of money on compute to make a brute-force algorithm discovered in the sixties look like the future. They are so wildly over-leveraged; orders of magnitude more than any Uber or Amazon market-capturing play ever was. They have more than $3 trillion-with-a-t in take-or-buy data center contracts coming due in 2028 that don't even appear as debt on their balance sheets. They have no hope of ever making a return without massively raising prices. Or being bailed out.

(Or they go bankrupt and crash the economy with them. Signed, an involuntary investor.)

Why would you enthusiastically participate in any of this? Why would you opt into doing this to your systems and the systems of a company who you hope, god willing, can continue to pay you in the future?

I know there is top-down pressure. I know it's now a job requirement to buy into this shit. I promise you, just a little longer. The token-spend minimums are already being replaced by token-spend caps. You don't have to make a bunch of noise pushing back, just stop leaning in.

Please, think of the systems we're all going to be stuck with on the other side.