So, I'm using AI both at work and for a personal greenfield project, and I have 20 years of pre-AI …

> But what if you have an established app with real users? I recently used GPT 5.5 "extra high" running nearly non-stop for about a week to upgrade a legacy ASP.NET Web Forms app to ASP.NET Core on .NET 10. This was considered "too hard" (too expensive) for human developers because it is a wholesale rewrite of every web page template. Not to mention that the dependency injection mechanism is totally different, async is more pervasive, etc. Worse still, the old app was split into a bunch of components with a variety of web API protocols in between them, had stupidly complex Oracle stored procedures, and a whole series of hidden land mines in the codebase. It was an undocumented, unmaintainable mess full of dead and spaghetti code. I would have estimated 6 months minimum for a human developer to uplift it, but 12 months is more realistic. Doing the same in a week feels like tapping into so…

> I keep thinking about that (so far anonymous) company that blew 500 million dollars worth of tokens in a month First I've heard of this. Do you know any more or could you maybe point me to a source? Kind of astounding if true! Agree that it would be very interesting to know what kind of output they got for all that effort.

> The other thing with regard to factories/agriculture/whatever is, in revolutions with those things nobody needed to be convinced Were you not around for "the internet is for nerds" and "why would I ever need to learn how to use a computer, I work in an office"? Are you familiar with the word "sabotage", originating from people who were trying to stop factories from taking over the world? It's part of why I find the anti-LLM pushback so bizarre - it used to be that people using computers and the internet were exactly the ones trying to convince others "hey, this is actually really cool". A decent chunk of us have seen this play out once or twice before. This is exactly the crowd that should remember how much convincing everybody needed, and how hard it was to get everyone to take things seriously!

> It's not just the time it takes to make the feature, you also have to consider documenting the feature, making sure it works well with the other features, making sure it's something customers actually want, making sure it's part of a larger coherent design, training customers, marketing the feature, etc. Seems like a conflation of responsibilities. An IC that implements a feature is rarely the same person who decided on the feature to build in the first place. This is really only true in exceptionally small teams where everyone wears multiple hats. If a programmer is also doing marketing, they're basically a sole proprietor. Since most people work with others who make product and marketing decisions, I don't feel like this line of thinking is relevant. Consider programming with a dumb text editor (no syntax highlighting, no integrated build/test/run cycle, no symbol/reference tracking,…