Discussion
Devs who think cheap code generation is going to benefit our profession are about to experience what happens when zero marginal cost meets infinite supply
(The price you can demand for anything that can be generated trends to zero is what happens. Dev pay and employment won't fair well)
@zzzeek First one happens. Then the other.
This is a well-known phenomenon in economics where information asymmetry means that the quality of the good bought isn't fully known to the buyer until well afterwards (see Akerlof's Market for Lemons).
Fun fact, this asymmetry drives the price down even more and can wipe out an entire market by making it unsustainable.
Software is so used to customer lock-in and monopolies that I suspect that if the industry as a whole were made to sit through an introductory microeconomics course everybody would come out of it at the end with angina, hypertension, and the kind of heart murmur that makes a cardiologist frown with worry.
@baldur Cardiologists like the business so while they might be concerned for the patients, at least their children can go to grad school.
@baldur as a full-stack leopard-tamer, when I voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party, I didn't realise there would be infinity leopards and that none of them would have been fed...
@baldur Though almost everything we can manufacture can be almost infinitely cheap, mostly it isn't and premium labels exist for everything (and aren't always just marketing)
@larsmb zero marginal cost (that is making a new copy of the work is free) is a completely different beast from cheap
And the effect when combined with automatically generated designs (that is code) that can also be infinitely copied for free and have limited protections from intellectual property law is likely to be a much stronger pressure to drive the price to zero.
@baldur Generation is trending towards "cheap" (at least for now, who knows what price it will settle on once "externals" need to be paid for rather than via infinite debt, sorry, venture capital). It also takes time.
But prompting still needs humans, and humans ain't free¹.
But yes, the way we've chosen to go about this clearly was the most human value destroying approach possible.
¹ the double-entendre wasn't intended, but I'm keeping it
@larsmb The specific price of generation is kind of irrelevant. What matters is that it's easily accessible, mostly affordable, and largely automatic. That creates an effectively endless supply which combined with the zero marginal cost of creating new copies of what's generated (and the reduced legal protections of "AI" works) drives the price down.
Unregulated markets routinely price human lives at zero or next to zero. Same with human effort. It's one of the reasons why capitalism sucks.
