At the same time, most of their junior devwork can be replaced completely by AI - so they really should start to learn how to work with it. I recommended everybody to get a private 20€/month claude subscription and use it for toy projects. I have younger devs (early 20s) in the team that told me they won't spend private money, or simply have no usecase in their private life for AI. We talk about software engineers here, and IMHO most of them are in denial of the fact that their skills have mostly become worthless if they don't start to pivot to something valueable.
If your employer is so cheap as to spend a $100 or less per month per engineer, while being large enough not to have access to the subscription plans, a move to self hosted or cheap providers does make sense in my view.
Each has their own characteristics and honestly you just get used to prompting each a bit differently.
Even better is to use an orchestrator (I switched to Paseo a few weeks back) with an agent "team" (in Paseo, these are just profiles that the orchestrator initiates). Then the orchestrator writes super detailed prompts to each sub-agent on your behalf and I find I get better results this way with less effort. I would describe it as "more autonomy".
For a large number of tasks you definitely don’t need a frontier model but a good harness around it.
If you don’t can’t/want to experiment with local model, have Claude implement the exact same feature with haiku/sonnet/opus and see what the differences are. You might be surprised.
To a lesser degree also Sonnet and Luna.
And when I say extensively I mean 500h+ on a side project in addition to my full-time job.
Even the difference between 5.6 Sol, which is miles ahead of local Qwen 3.8 27B, and Opus 5.5 is immediately obvious in the quality of the results.
Having been stuck on 5.6 Sol at my job while Opus 5.5 was available at home, I can say with full confidence that the difference is significant, even if I weren't looking at the output at all.
The way it understands my requests, forms a hypothesis, verifies the result and finishes the change is night and day different. This happens while 5.6 Sol is still flailing around somewhere in the monorepo struggling with even locating the relevant code.
I am perfectly able to do the tasks with own custom harness and unlimited local Qwen 3.8 27B with 150t/s. Harness needs search capability and more fine-tuning for the job.
You need less words to describe the intent with Astra/Opus 5.5, and it automatically usually observes the best practice that you don't need to explicitly tell, but with only a slight more effort you can get the job done. I have even made security audits with Qwen 3.8 27B against projects fully written with Claude Opus and it is a bit mind-boggling, but there have been tens of vulnerabilities, identified by this model alone. This excludes the issues found when guiding more myself.
I also attribute a lot of it to be just plain outright denial. I have a feeling a lot of people don't WANT to understand that their coding skills they acquired over years have dropped a lot in worth. It is the "as long as I don't step on a scale, I can't be overweight" kind of denial. You are afraid to see what is behind the curtain, so you simply don't do it.
But, because of the explorations I've done with them, I know substantially more about input method APIs, UEFI, PCIDs, seL4, WebAssembly, GLSL, Service Workers, CORS, server-sent events, CSS, content-security policies, memory-hard PBKDFs, Android, numerical integration, Verilog, V8 security, Linux process namespaces, hypervisors with VT-x, multitouch user interface design, radio communications theory, power electronics, TypeScript, physical-layer communications protocols, NTSC video signals, TLA+, bounded model checking, Rust, generative testing, theorem provers, FPGAs, Linux system call overhead, Unix mailbox formats, physical modeling synthesis, damped resonance, KaTeX, geology, dishwashing detergent, microbiology, Cyclone, thermodynamics, X-Windows, localStorage, AVX, Excel, and IndexedDB, for example. Most of these are things I knew very little about before, so I may not know much about then now, but it's enormously more than I did.
Aside from being very pleasurable, I have the impression that this knowledge is valuable in designing systems whose implementation I can then elicit from an AI model.
I don't know how long the knowledge will remain instrumentally valuable. Possibly a year from now, we'll all be dead, or slaves to Sam Altman. Or the AIs will be so much better at designing the systems we would have wanted to design, if we were smarter and knew more, that there's no instrumental value in humans doing it. Or, less drastically, maybe a new AI-written software platform will have so completely displaced Android and the browser platform that there's no value in knowing what they do and don't permit. Like knowing the ins and outs of PHIGS, INFORMIX-ONLINE, or CORBA. (Thermodynamics is probably safe, though.)
But it seems like, in the less insane possible futures, a lot of this knowledge will remain empowering for some time.
Not very different from managing a team, just without the human problems.
Saying "you can use as much as you want but don't use too much or you'll get in trouble" is obviously confusing and is going to result in most people barely using it
Help me understand what exactly is the drawback you’re mentioning. In your previous comment you were suggesting these people spend their own personal money and personal time on projects to benefit their work time. They (quite reasonably, it seems from the limited context) decided that no, they won’t dedicate life and resources from outside work to more work. Fortunately, it seems they have some job security (German, but probably some from the EU as well) which allows them to make whatever choice they believe is healthier to them, without fearing repercussions. What’s the drawback?
This would check out with the fact that there aren't many software products or platforms made in Germany, compared to say the US or China.
This raises questions about how sustainable this situation is and if it might further increase the gap in income of software engineers in the US compared to Germany.
Even the best benefits do arguably not make up for receiving $2500 net at the end of the month compared to $8k in the US.
And I get what you are saying about work life balance and so on, but if one cannot even be bothered to try a $20 AI subscription at home, there must be about zero passion for the craft.
That’s not what the description says. Not being a rockstar does not mean being incompetent. They claimed (and let’s not forget this is one person’s account) the devwork of those people could be replaced with AI. Even assuming that is true, that does not mean their current work is bad or that they can’t improve, or that they don’t have other valuable skills.
The drawback you’re listing there, in addition to being dubious, seems to be exclusively for the owners of the company. What about the workers?
> This would check out with the fact that there aren't many software products or platforms made in Germany, compared to say the US or China.
Good. I don’t think the software products coming from the US and the culture of exploiting people for profit are a net positive for humanity. I’d rather not have those companies, so a system which prevents that from happening is working as it should.
> Even the best benefits do arguably not make up for receiving $2500 net at the end of the month compared to $8k in the US.
Happiness reports disagree.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report
You don‘t need to earn a lot of money when your basic needs are met. Like not worrying that a sudden illness will bankrupt you.
> And I get what you are saying about work life balance and so on, but if one cannot even be bothered to try a $20 AI subscription at home, there must be about zero passion for the craft.
Why must that be the way? Perhaps they instead believe they can and should improve in other ways, including understanding that you can’t learn without doing, and delegating your tasks to LLMs prevents you from doing so. Seems very strange to claim that the programmer who does not use AI is the one lacking passion for the craft.
I mean the drawback is none as long as they have job security. Unless you realize you work for a public entity that is paid for by the tax payer.
I don’t see how working for a public entity is relevant. If anything, I sure hope (but I’m not deluding myself) the people who work for public entities work slowly, deliberately, and methodically. The last thing I want from public entities is a focus on “velocity” and merging code the authors don’t understand.
That is exactly what I am saying and I would advise them. If you are early 20s right now and a software dev, just waiting for your employer (a large, slow enterprise) to train you an AI seems like a career killer. The whole attitude of "I landed a job with job security, so I am not doing a thing more than I have to" is what drives germany into the ground...
That seems strange to me. A country is made of people, and people are more than their jobs. The fixation on work above everything to benefit an entity whose only purpose is to make money and that would chew and spit you out at the first opportunity seems unhealthy to me. I’d much rather we worked on making the people happy and not concentrate so much wealth in the hands of a few, that seems to me like a better way to improve a country. But hey, happy to disagree. Thank you for engaging and expressing and clarifying your views.
I still sometimes spend a bit of personal money and time to tinker with technology, sometimes on the basis that it'll probably be good to know some of this stuff. It's like being surprised a chef likes to experiment a bit in their kitchen at home.
Their point is with total job security there's no real drive to actually be good at your job and little incentive to improve. Just be good enough to not be labeled entirely incompetent and truly unfit for the job, not any better. Would you go to a doctor who hasn't bothered learning anything new about medicine for decades and still practices like it's the 1950s, or one which continually evolved their practice to stick with modern times? Would you want to go to a doctor who truly didn't care about being a halfway decent doctor? Would you prefer a policeman who truly didn't care about being a halfway decent policeman? Teachers who just don't care about being decent at teaching, only the bare minimum to not get fired?
You went to university to become a better employee?! Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I find that notion profoundly sad. Most people I interacted with in college did it for the experience, and I’m happy to report many are better people for it.
But hey, I’m not going to criticise you for doing that, you made your choice about what was right for you and that’s all I’m saying, that it is a good thing that people Have that choice. It’s good that you can do that if you want but also not do that if you don’t want.
> I still sometimes spend a bit of personal money and time to tinker with technology
So do I. And it’s always best when I can decide to do it or not do it, depending on the rest of the context in my life.
> It's like being surprised a chef likes to experiment a bit in their kitchen at home.
No, no, it’s nothing like that. Because I’m not at all surprised that people do it (like I said, I do it myself), all I’m saying is that it seems positive to me that you have the choice.
> Their point is with total job security there's no real drive to actually be good at your job and little incentive to improve.
Aren’t you yourself proof that that is not true? And nothing indicates those people aren’t getting better, they’re just not doing the specific thing the other person suggested as a means to that end. That’s not at all the same thing.
> Would you go to a doctor who hasn't bothered learning anything new about medicine for decades and still practices like it's the 1950s, or one which continually evolved their practice to stick with modern times?
Ooh, boy. If you think most doctors out there are continually improving, I have some very bad news for you. Those who do are the exception, not the norm. Also, 1950s? Come on, let’s please make coherent arguments. That would mean they’d been practicing for seven decades, making them close to centenarian. If such a doctor is still able to stand and be rational and practice medicine coherently, you should at least be curious about listening.
Not the sole reason, no. But it's not like that wasn't a reason, it was certainly a big one. And that's an incredibly common reason to go. And no, I didn't even get a degree in the field I'm working in currently, but the things I learned getting the degree have definitely helped me be far more effective at work.
> Aren’t you yourself proof that that is not true?
No, because I'm not a government employee with near total job certainty. If I'm not keeping up, I'm falling behind, and will likely find myself replaced in short order. There are millions of people in the world who can do what I do, and what I do can be done practically anywhere there's a data signal.
But make me a government employee who practically can never be fired, well, that sure changes incentives doesn't it. Why spend any second to improve when there's no downside to stagnate?
> nothing indicates those people aren’t getting better, they’re just not doing the specific thing the other person suggested as a means to that end. That’s not at all the same thing.
Sure. Believe what you will. I've worked with countless people who have this mentality. Giving these people more job security guarantees they'll care even less about their job performance and growth. Having the job is 100% about getting a check on the pay period, not about actually doing anything useful.
If someone doesn't think €20 and a few hours spread over a month isn't worth it to be better at their job, I can't imagine they're really working hard at improving any other ways.
> If you think most doctors out there are continually improving
I don't think that. I agree many stagnate. And I usually choose to avoid those which seem to be stagnating. Is it a good thing so many in that industry stagnate? So much better for everyone isn't it, having nearly incompetent doctors everywhere.
You seem to be suggesting that being a government employee gives you near total job certainty and that to have that job security you need to be a government employee. That is not the case. At all. Maybe where you live, but certainly not everywhere. And yes, I am keenly aware of highly incompetent people (in healthcare no less!) who have job security. Is that a good situation? No. But throwing the baby out with the bathwater and making it a free-for-all where everyone is stressed all the time and can be kicked to the curb on a whim isn’t a better way to properly advance a society. Not if you care about something other than the unfettered pursuit of profit, anyway, and I believe we should care about more than that.
Because you edited your previous post, I’ll point out that I find the new examples (teachers and cops) to be even worse. Policemen are notorious for abuses of powers with no repercussions, I honestly don’t know what to tell you if you’re not aware of that. Teachers get the short end of the stick, and the best ones are seldom recognised. Again, if you're not aware of that I’m not really sure what to tell you.
Also, of course it’s not good to have incompetent doctors, and of course that was not the argument. I invite you to steel man if you want to have a productive conversation. Nowhere am I saying unrestricted job security is the right solution, I am instead pointing out that giving all the power to the employer causes worse problems, and that in general we should care about people’s well-being instead of trying to “advance” and being afraid of “being left behind” all the time. That’s not healthy, and it is stupid to chase “progress” if not to improve lives.
I'm not in Germany, but I definitely see this attitude in lots of positions in what I see as jobs with excessive job security.
> Policemen are notorious for abuses of powers with no repercussions
So wouldn't it be good if they potentially had less job security so they'd actually face some real repercussions for their bad actions? Instead they often have some of the strongest job protections out there. They can sometimes even murder people and still collect a full paycheck while cooling off for a few weeks.
> Teachers get the short end of the stick, and the best ones are seldom recognised
I agree. And once again, lots of job security programs ensure the ones continuing to scrape by get promoted and kept while those actually trying just face burn out. I definitely think teachers in general should be paid more and should have good incentive systems (of which there are lots of bad incentive systems, it's a tricky thing to do well in this space).
> in general we should care about people’s well-being instead of trying to “advance” and being afraid of “being left behind” all the time.
I truly do agree we should try and have a good balance of work/life, and I do agree tons of people in places like the US are way too overly focused on the work side of that. I'm just pointing out when you focus too much on the other side, all your industries are no longer competitive on the global marketplace[0] and you'll find yourself a lot worse off. Having people who aren't effectively incentivized to improve (for whatever improve means in context) is not a good thing, I think we can both agree on that.
FWIW, that kind of near total job security leading to not caring about improving isn't inherently a government job kind of thing. I've known lots of people in private industry be effectively the same. The real connection is places with extreme bureaucracy. And I'm definitely not trying to bash all government employees, many truly are hard workers who care.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/volksw...
With teachers, the laws which protect the bad ones also help the good ones, and I’d say teachers (for the mandatory school system) mostly range from the mediocre to the exceptional. It’s hard to be too incompetent when following a government lesson plan. And it’s not like they can’t be fired for being truly egregious.
> I'm just pointing out when you focus too much on the other side, all your industries are no longer competitive on the global marketplace[0] and you'll find yourself a lot worse off.
Right, but what I’m saying is I think we don’t focus on the life side of things enough. Right now focus pends too much for the work side, which has a detrimental effect on the life side, which in turn has repercussions on the work side. We can improve work output by improving life, but the reverse isn’t really true. Laws like forbidding employers from contacting employees outside work hours are a good step.
> Having people who aren't effectively incentivized to improve (for whatever improve means in context) is not a good thing, I think we can both agree on that.
In the abstract, we definitely agree. But I haven’t forgotten that the context of our conversation was someone giving a particular view of how to improve on a particular job, and that entailed concessions on the life side. Instead of trying to get their colleagues to do something different, the person could advise the employer on how to improve conditions so that employees want to do the thing. In a sense, if you want people feel incentivised you should give them a reason to. While some people may coast on job security, others thrive because they can take risks and don’t have to be afraid all the time.
> I truly do agree we should try and have a good balance of work/life, and I do agree tons of people in places like the US are way too overly focused on the work side of that.
In the end I’m happy we both agree on what’s most important, even if we have slightly different opinions on how to get there. I also agree there are government employees who truly care and are hard workers and that extreme bureaucracy is detrimental.
I've definitely experienced the "improving work output improved life", in that being better at my job has led to continual job growth which has put me in more fun positions and better compensation.
> the person could advise the employer on how to improve conditions so that employees want to do the thing
For large organizations (especially government ones) this is often a sisyphean task. Feel free to keep rolling that boulder though. Personally I'll choose to improve myself for some percentage of my personal time, and suggest to others to do the same. I'll also try and suggest to my management to ensure they are ensuring their workers are staying sharp and figure out good ways to keep them so with what company resources are alloted to them. But in the end, you are the one most looking out for you, don't expect your employer to have your best interests at heart. If all your work improvement solely comes from your employer, there's a good chance you won't continue to be relevant after a while. I agree this shouldn't be the case in a "good" society, but its the reality of life.
> While some people may coast on job security, others thrive because they can take risks and don’t have to be afraid all the time.
In a lot of these overly bureaucratic orgs we're talking about which create these roles which are hard to remove people from allowing such workers to coast forever, they're also often not great about rewarding risk taking.
Here is €1B in initial capital. Go!
I can see the profits already!
Why do we even have insurance companies at this point?
That's about 20€/month more than I care to give Anthropic. They already stole my data and now they want my money too? No thanks. I'll stick to running Gemma or Qwen on my Mac.
I'm struggling to wrap my head around this. "This technology will completely replace you and lead to your unemployment, so you should fund it out of your own pocket"? Is that what you're saying? If so, can you please explain your reasoning?
"AI can do all the development work on its own, and you will be replaced by it, but I won't because my position as a meat proxy relaying instructions makes me special" is just you trying to cope with the inevitability of your own prophecy. You WILL be laid off too.
But your comment says it several time: the valuable skill is being already a seasoned dev.
Then AI is superpower.
It's for the junior that things sucks big times.
I see it all around me: senior devs are empowered while juniors are not even hired anymore.
Given that we are seeing a big retirement wave of the boomers, a lot of seasoned devs will retire in the next 10 years. So there should be enough demand, and a big enough paycheck for that decade long training to make its moneys worth.
Now, within the last 6-12 months of AI advancement, I think you could lay off half or even 3/4 of the team if I was explicitly allowed to implement features myself using AI. But that is not the current policy.
As for worries "ending up on a codebase you can't manage without AI" - my personal take is: No, I am not worried. Because going forward AI will always be available in the development workflow. That is my own opinion, not the corporation standpoint, however.
A way bigger problem is a codebase that you can't effectively work on with AI, which is a lot of legacy humanslop. And things that make a codebase more suited for AI, like documentation that provides relevant domain knowledge and context for requirements, automated quality control, and test coverage, also make a codebase easier to work on for a human too.
And that whole "legacy humanslop" paragraph is just stating the obvious with an air of spite towards humans.
People who can't bother to reason get angry when you say "hey, why put all eggs into one basket", episode N. Boring.
It's not even a matter of incompetence, most of the humanslop came from the fact that you could just never implement anything properly in the time you were expected to do it.
https://jacquesmattheij.com/local-inference-with-large-langu...
If you have more questions feel free to mail or ask here in the thread and I'll do my best to answer.
The hardware related parts are near the end of the article.
Edit: ok, should be good again. For some reason on that box running Python from cron jobs is unpredictable, usually it works but every now and then it does not and I've yet to find out why.
They are less good on ambiguous prompts like 'fix all the problems' (which to my chagrin is a very common prompt it turns out..)
To give one example: I'm doing a lot of stuff that involves hardware. When settings things up for fixing a bug I have to make sure to include that the hardware has been tested and works well. If I don't do that the model will almost certainly spend a ridiculous amount of time speculating about all the different ways in which the hardware could be broken (including theorizing about chip mask errors and all kinds of other obscure and rarely seen in practice defects). It's going to end up telling itself that for sure the 500 lines it just produced are absolutely perfect and the device that is on the i2c bus is broken in a way that it just really can't progress with solving the issue because there is nothing wrong with the code.
These kinds of blind-spots are funny when they happen once in a month but when they happen regularly it begins to be irritating. Adding a line or two to the prompt will take care of the issue. Frontier models tend to be better at this sort of thing.
At this point though our context is so dynamic because of lesson propogation its hard to think about a model on its own - a vanilla harness (which we were forced to use recently because the memories system went down for a bit) just felt so different!
So they've invested around $2.5M-3M into hardware + monthly operating costs (electricity, updates, cooling). I wonder how much did they spend on tokens to decide to make such a switch. I mean if they used to spend $500k-1M per month just on tokens then it would pay off in a year or so, assuming their infra will be stable and efficient.
We'll see if that's a trend for mid-big companies or just an experiment.
All that math is assuming that it's all self-hosted in their data center or so and not paying to a cloud provider, which will be probably more expensive.
The slice of the pie where frontier models are required is just gonna be smaller and smaller. And at point where AI wrote docs, tests, and all the easy and medium difficulty functions you are already saving a ton per employee
Are you assuming that they bought the hardware? because they could also be renting the metal off a provider, in which case they either pay by the hour or have a yearly commitment to save on costs.
At the moment at least Nvidia doesn't have a incentive to release a new product because it's sold out as it is and probably doesn't want to plunge their customers in depth with outdated products?
Yes, margins will go down a bit but the frontier labs still have some leverage.
They also could consider putting this on openrouter when they have spare capacity to make the most effective use of the hardware.
And we haven't even scratched the surface on highliy-specialized distillations. All those generall-purpose open-weight model will see distilled variations for their respective industry niches.
I'm currently running Qwen3 Coder Next, which is a 80B A3B model, at 15tps on a 8GB 7700S and 64GB RAM.
It's an idiot (no Thinking), so it has to go over its work several times to get it right, but it's the largest idiot I can feasibly run at the moment.
Also by accident I'm undercutting the only provider of this model on OpenRouter by 40%, doing $0.48/mTok.
Of course at my token rate it would take an entire day to even reach a million tokens, but it's the principle that matters.
I would not be surprised if, in 5 years, there's a neat, low-power GPU in high end laptops, alternatively, a cheap, say 500 USD or so, GPU in a box, that you can use for your AI-center at home or in the office.
The relevant question is how easy is to setup 56x B200s in a cluster, are we talking about a adhoc infra team job or clicking a button on AWS?
One would still have to guess what the ratio of input tokens to output tokens is. (I would say 10:1 off the cuff, assuming this is editing an existing codebase)
The last cause might be a straight up blocker - certain financial regulations straight up prevent you from giving third parties to your data (esp outside national/EU jurisdiction), no matter what documents you sign.
Time for the daily reminder that ZDR is a pinky-promise.
ZDR is a contract clause. That means:
- It is subject to the rest of the contract, e.g. the good old "subject to lawful request or court order" carve-out clauses
- It is subject to random provider exceptions, e.g. see Anthropic and Fable.
- You have no way of verifying it beyond "trust me bro".
- Run your own hardware which is obviously the ideal situation
- If you can't run your own hardware, use confidential computing which runs the AI in secure enclave, e.g. Privatemode[1] (Germany) or Tinfoil[2] (US)
First, the obvious answer, Privatemode.ai has been independently externally audited[1]. So there's that. ;)
Tinfoil have not been independently audited, apparently its "coming soon (maybe)".
Secondly, I quite clearly said "if you can't run your own hardware". But to spell it out: There is no debate to be had that your own hardware will always be best. Preferably in your own private datacentre so as to avoid evil-maid attacks.
However, if we are starting from the position where you CANNOT run your own hardware, then clearly these services are preferable to some "trust me bro" contract clause.
The enclave providers publish their repos on GitHub and you can cryptographically check the attestation change.
Is it perfect ? Of course not.
Is it a million times better than "trust me bro" ZDR ? Hell yes.
The "trust me bro" people don't even publish their runners in GitHub. So you have absolute zero visibility, you cannot even check their claims on a theoretical level, its a complete closed-shop.
Where I work, its quite the opposite.
US exposure is deemed a risk in itself. CLOUD act, PATRIOT act and then the general political situation in the US.
We and many others I know have been working hard to minimize US exposure to the maximum extent possible because the US risk has gone from theoretical to actual.
Because you already have your BI and mails on these providers.
Erm. Exactly the same thing applies ? AWS, Azure or "direct" ... its all still "trust me dude".
And for the US-jurisdiction side, AWS/Azure EU is fake EU due to the CLOUD act, PATRIOT act etc.
> Because you already have your BI and mails on these providers.
You might. Lots of people don't. My $work and many others included.
But the goal posts will move and I think frontier labs will find new areas that have a need for absolute frontier.
Guess who else has that? The Chinese companies developing open weight models. In fact, the vast majority of AI science comes from China. They might still be playing catch up in some areas, but they're also leading in others (famously DeepSeek's inference architecture as an example).
There is IMO a non-trivial chance those labs will eventually surpass the US ones and become themselves "frontier", and that may happen sooner than a lot of people expect.
Of course, it still remains to be seen if they will keep publishing the weights at that point.
At some point, they'll stop releasing models for free and will need a license.
Is this a guess, or do you have any information to back that inference (no pun intended)?
There are already rumblings of CCP wanting to control export of top tier frontier models.
I mean if they don't then the US companies could just release their weights and chop the Chinese off at the knee's at that point (reversing what is currently happening).
Opening the weights isn't just a technical thing, it's a geopolitical decision which likely in part comes from the top of the CCCP (by either request or just implicitly allowing it).
And they will keep it to themselves to extract the value for as long as possible.
On both frontiers and open. And lately the gap has been closing so if anything yeeting Anthropic etc is getting more viable over time
I have no clue how do the lunatics think there's any moat in models.
My whole company (Amazon) has unlimited tokens, and the only thing it has led to is insane amounts of slop. Illusion of productivity.