Lines of code is a debit not a credit

Perhaps you meant this the other way around. A credit entry indicates an increase in the amount you owe.

"technology too expensive to be offered at a profit (yet)" != hype

I think of early voice recognition

at first everyone was going to talk to their computer

and there were programs that would let you do just that!

and then it all fizzled

except it didn't. Phone trees quietly started to use voice recognition, and some devices used it, and now it is pretty commonplace.... but it seeped into place, not a giant wave.

Funny thing - lots of computers are losing their jobs to AI. I think it has replaced search quite quickly.

and new computer jobs are being created. The AI summaries of amazon product reviews are pretty good.

If we're actually headed for a "house of cards" AI crash in a couple months, that actually makes their arrangement with Meta likely more valuable, not less. Meta is a much more diversified company than the AI companies that these folks were poached from. Meta stock will likely be more resilient than AI-company stock in the event of an AI bubble bursting. Moreover, they were offered so much of it that even if it were to crash 50%, they'd still be sitting on $50M-$100M+ of stock.

I'm somewhere in the middle on this, with regards to the ROI... this isn't the kind of thing where you see immediate reflection on quarterly returns... it's the kind of thing where if you don't hedge some bets, you're likely to completely die out from a generational shift.

Facebook's product is eyeballs... they're being usurped on all sides between TikTok, X and BlueSky in terms of daily/regular users... They're competing with Google, X, MS, OpenAI and others in terms of AI interactions. While there's a lot of value in being the option for communication between friends and family, and the groups on FB don't have a great alternative, the entire market can shift greatly depending on AI research.

I look at some of the (I think it was OpenAI) in generated terrain/interaction and can't help but think that's a natural coupling to FB/Meta's investments in their VR headsets. They could potentially completely lose on a platform they largely pioneered. They could wind up like Blackberry if they aren't ready to adapt.

By contrast, Apple's lack of appropriate AI spending should be very concerning to any investors... Google's assistant is already quite a bit better than Siri and the gap is only getting wider. Apple is woefully under-invested, and the accountants running the ship don't even seem to realize it.

If it passes the unit tests I make it write and works for my sample manual cases I absolutely will not spend time reading the implementation details unless and until something comes up. Sometimes garbage makes its way into git but working code is better than no code and the mess can be cleaned up later. If you have correctness at the interface and function level you can get a lot done quickly. Technical debt is going to come out somewhere no matter what you do.

I read AI coding negativity on Hacker News and Reddit with more and more astonishment every day. It's like we live in different worlds. I expect the breadth of tooling is partly responsible. What it means to you to "use the LLM code" could be very different from what it means to me. What LLM are we talking about? What context does it have? What IDE are you using?

Personally, I wrote 200K lines of my B2B SaaS before agentic coding came around. With Sonnet 4 in Agent mode, I'd say I now write maybe 20% of the ongoing code from day to day, perhaps less. Interactive Sonnet in VS Code and GitHub Copilot Agents (autonomous agents running on GitHub's servers) do the other 80%. The more I document in Markdown, the higher that percentage becomes. I then carefully review and test.

It's a new hammer

but one that is improving at an exponential pace and is developing capabilities to use itself with increasing reliability

It's easy to look at AI and draw a simple analogy to existing tools, because in most cases it is used as a tool, but the properties of intelligence and its ability to make things in the world is very unique and not comparable to any other tool.

All tools are useful because they require intelligence to use, and the tool magnifies the aim of intelligence. When the tools become intelligent themselves, certain recursive feedback loops will start to appear. Simply look at the quality of AI code outputs from 2 years ago compared to today.

"would be required on a per user basis or track the access rights along with the content, which is infeasible and does not scale"

Citation needed.

Most enterprise (homegrown or not) search engine products have to do this, and have been able to do it effectively at scale, for decades at this point.

This is a very well known and well-solved problem, and the solutions are very directly applicable to the products you list.

It is, as they say, a simple matter of implementation - if they don't offer it, it's because they haven't had the engineering time and/or customer need to do it.

Not because it doesn't scale.