Paywalled news articles rank on their full content (potentially displacing other, free sources) yet do not allow me to see it without paying. That's a bit of a problem because if I don't intend or am unable to pay I would much prefer seeing the other source which is free.

(the ice cream example is disingenuous because clearly we do not yet have the technology for ice-cream-over-HTTP. And when we do get such technology, then absolutely give me the option to block paywalled ice cream).

I would love it if I could be able to pay _once_ in one-click just like if I was purchasing a physical paper. But until this happens, I'm more than happy not paying (nor reading) paywalled online news.

Merely listing prices (without an associated automated payment form which could imply a contract was en force upon successful payment) doesn't actually force you to do business with anyone. It would however 1) deter requests for unpaid work by giving them an idea of what it would cost to get what they're looking for and 2) give you an idea of the demand for said services and could give you a warm lead which you can then choose to pursue formally by getting the necessary business structure, legal/business advice, etc.

Counterpoint: you can't just go to Visa/Mastercard or a merchant acquirer out there and set up an account on the same terms that Stripe can.

On the other hand, you can sign up to any LLM provider and get API access on terms that are the same or better (since I'm sure they don't appreciate having a middleman and would benefit from incentivizing direct usage) than OpenRouter gets.

Not enough of these cases happen under warranty for them to bother (and out of warranty cases are either neutral, or even beneficial to them if they drive sales of new hardware).

By then, a new fad will come in and you can just pivot to it.

We went from "engagement" (with no concrete plans to monetize said engagement), through a brief period of "blockchain" and now finally AI.

Not only that, but the "entitlement" (Apple lingo for code-signature flag that grants capabilities) needed to publish a browser effectively requires to be an established company, ensuring hobbyists can't really get there with an open-source project even though the sources of Firefox are available and could technically be ported.

These are currently problematic due to context length. You should have working memory of the whole codebase layout to decide on a sane architecture, identify opportunities for deduplication/consolidation, etc.

(thinking of black holes for example - they were theorized way before we had observations. And presumably a lot of particle physics can similarly be theorized before we built the technology to experimentally verify them)

I was talking more about end-to-end feature/product development process from the perspective of the business, and not merely the "writing code" part. Things like figuring out what to build, what code to write (which remains - just that now you are writing a prompt instead of writing the code directly), design, customer support, regulatory compliance/etc.

From this perspective I believe that even if AI does actually automate away software development, we will find out that on average it was never actually the bottleneck nor a significant cost of the product lifecycle. Thus I'm not in a hurry to go all-in on AI just because I don't see old-school human-powered SW dev at being the bottleneck, at least not on the products/projects I work on (large software products with established customer bases).

In a lot of cases I find that the what to build is the biggest bottleneck - and in fact the relative slowness and occasional pushback (because they have skin in the game - see below) of conventional human-powered SW dev forces the stakeholder to think really well about what they want and gives them time to refine that idea. If I were to give them a hypothetical "SW dev in a minute" magic wand it would result in a lot of ill-defined & incoherent features being thrown at the wall which will quickly overwhelm support, destroy their reputation with customers (or worse, regulators) and become a perpetual maintenance burden slowing down any further development to a standstill (whether human or agentic). So I don't do that for my own sanity, even though that magic wand already exists and it's called Claude Code.

This is not to say I find AI completely useless - I see plenty of opportunities for AI to help out with non-product-related tasks - housekeeping that doesn't introduce/change any functionality and would normally rot in the backlog forever are good candidates, assuming I have good end-to-end tests and a full isolated environment where the agent can drive the whole product to QA its own work as to not create additional review burden (otherwise, I would have to review and QA it myself which is often as much effort as just doing the work myself).

> you don't usually have the time to pour over code when you manage multiple engineers either

One thing that I get with humans but not agents is skin in the game and self-preservation. A human writing code will write in such a way as to minimize future work to himself next time there's an outage, support ticket or likely change request and 2) will retain memory of what he wrote so that he will be able to address that support ticket or outage much quicker than a human having to effectively reverse-engineer the code to figure it out. From that perspective, agentic development didn't save time, it merely shifted it from the development phase to when the first support ticket or problem arises (the former can be scheduled and budgeted in, the latter is worse as it arises at unexpected times, derailing whatever else is happening).

(this obviously only works in environments where engineers are encouraged to own things end-to-end. I know some places treat their human engineers as a dumb one-shot ticket->code translator and discourage thinking or taking responsibility beyond that. These are the same places that wonder why they're not able to make any progress because they're stuck endlessly fire-fighting the crap such a degenerate process produces)

> With juniors [...] output needs to constantly be critically evaluated

This raises a scary catch-22. How are the juniors meant to evaluate the output without the expertise they'd only gain by being "in the trenches" for 10+ years? LLMs only help to a point - as they can be convinced of anything depending on prompting or persuasion (I've had Claude adamantly claim things that were wrong which I only picked up on because of actual experience. Similarly, I can easily steer it off the correct path with just a couple suggestions).

The problem of upskilling engineers is not new - billions have been thrown at the problem in the form of bootcamps/etc and yet there's still no good replacement for actual experience doing things and getting burnt in the process. I'm worried that deference to AI will mean a sea of perpetual juniors (but with senior responsibility and blast radius) and the jobs market for actually skilled & experienced talent drying up even more.

> bespoke personal apps and tooling, development tools, I'm working on games, libraries, various kinds of research, you name it.

Absolutely, same here. But building goodies for yourself is different from building them for paying customers. The latter brings a certain expectation of stability and support. In fact this is why even pre-LLM, there is a huge gap between being able to program and being able to launch a product, and why many programmers' pet projects never made it to the latter.

> Clients are going to accept less stable but more ambitious demos.

Demos? Sure. But generally speaking they're paying you for the actual implementation and subsequent support and maintenance of it. Salespeople being able to bang out a demo with a few prompts without engineering involvement could also mean more cases of them selling an impossible feature (that human-powered engineering could've warned them about).

Otherwise the car is still connected and very likely broadcasting telemetry anyway (and the "account" part is handled entirely on the backend). Refusing to set up or use the app is merely a placebo.