The question should really be what is the reservation price of existing buyers.
At some point the price will rise. But the value has to have risen for existing buyers to be ok with that - but can they perceive the value? Hmmm difficult to tell. Benchmarks are not an objective way to measure that.
In the long run google is most likely to acquire a serious cost advantage given their level of vertical integration.
We've been experimenting with claude code handling jira tickets and opening PR -- we're starting with Opus. It costs about $1 per PR that gets merged-- how much does it cost to have a software engineer do that PR? That's your price sensitivity. It will only get cheaper as models get more efficient and people get better at using them, though.
Managers of firms care about impact of financials. They don’t care about the metrics you are measuring / gaming. Ultimately all ‘progress’ has to show in the cash flows.
Are you taking more cost reduction projects and more revenue-generating projects? Are you actually delivering? Are customers perceiving you to be as trusted as before? Etc. are the only things that matter. ‘Show me the money’.
To me this is akin to the discussion re. Scrum, agile etc. Who cares? Show me the money.
My intuition tells me that llm’s combined with SWE’s with really amazing fundamentals will kill the code monkeys.
And frankly? That’s the best outcome. Code monkeys (in my view that’s an individual who writes out code just to complete a jira ticket) are a liability. Not only that but each additional person you have in an org means more noise creation.
If this forces the code monkeys to level up to compete… again a good thing.
The code base should not be elongated nor complicated. I’m not even a SWE by trade, rather a CEO, and this is my preferred outcome.
At some point the price will rise. But the value has to have risen for existing buyers to be ok with that - but can they perceive the value? Hmmm difficult to tell. Benchmarks are not an objective way to measure that.
In the long run google is most likely to acquire a serious cost advantage given their level of vertical integration.
reply