That’s what I don’t get about this whole AI push. It’s a global rug that everyone plans to pull, it’s sold at cost, it already presents major risks, everyone seems to be aware of all that and yet - the consumers and lawmakers are relatively quiet.

idiocracy in progress

You can only build it for free if you don't value your time. That is good for personal projects and hobbies but which company can build stuff without costs? There was always an expense to generating code. Plus you have to pay for equipment, electricity, subscriptions to stuff for their staff etc.

I don't really think they are packaging up ability to think abd selling it back to you. There is nothing stopping you from not using AI and even companies, many firms just dont trust AI and don't use it.

But the idea that code could be built of thin air is not true in case of actual businesses.

I really dislike it but the effectiveness of code generation is just too good now. I really doubted it at first but I can churn out 10x the work. Is it the same quality as IC? no but I think that it doesn't matter anymore. How many of us have worked on some 10+m loc monstrosity for years never knowing more than 1% of the codebase? Probably most. Now I can generate that same monstrosity on my own. I've created a 1.1m+ loc and growing trading platform that automates options trades based on live ML edges from research papers. I never would have been able to do that on my own before LLM's. It has full telemetry and comprehensive error logging and testing as well. I'd have been strained to get MVP done before LLMs.

I don't think someone without coding experience can do it though. I've accepted that the new expected output for a single dev will eventually converge to 10x-100x what it is now.