The thing is they are inventing new things people will want to do. But for example, "loops", fully hands-off agentic coding etc., seem really unlikely to get much traction because that just isn't how software is designed within its producer/user community.

Requirements evolve in use, and fully hands-off LLMs simply cannot be trusted to only change the things you ask them to change, so I don't think it's likely that products will, in the main, be developed that way.

And if you don't need that fully-hands-off stuff, then the models that run on at least reasonably modest desktop hardware are surprisingly close to being enough.

I’ve been on a GLM coding plan since they launched ~year ago and it’s been at „good enough“ since the start. Tangible behind absolute SOTA but like you say most coding isn’t rocket science.

I don’t think this is true. All the models prior to Fable were honestly dumb as rocks, and Fable is too sometimes, but at least it’s helpful now and not a hindrance.

The future of AI most definitely involves making something twice as good as Fable that is virtually its own employee, and not on reducing inference costs because to be honest Fable isn't actually that expensive.

The real utility behind an AI model (imagining that it can be made twice as good as it is now) would be being able to scale a small business up and down instantly without hiring (to implement a new feature or whatever), which is costly and time consuming these days.