AI isnt the future, yet.

A lot of talk about AI this non-E3 season. A lot of programmers saying "We all use AI. It's in all the games" and I can't help but hear "We are making so much working gig jobs. Nobody is going to work a traditional job". 

This is how the tech economy works. Disruptive products are disruptive because they are sold at a loss. They are unsustainable because they are never meant to be sustained at that level. Gig workers had a rude awakening when Uber had to start making a profit. Programmers are the new gig workers. 

Eventually token prices are going up, a lot. They will have to because the memory crunch from Data Center dumping is impacting other industries and big tech is making powerful opponents. Eventually a combination of shareholder and political pressure will force Big Tech to stop spending and start producing. The pressure will hit them from both sides as their Data Center bandwidth hits a limit and the need to make profit, within that bandwidth, becomes a "this quarter" problem instead of a "next year" problem.

Some companies have already reached 90% token-assisted (not local LLM like Linux Kernal) code generation. Double that token price and the likely outcome is a loss of more than half of code production, because for every hour saved through token-assisted code is an hour shifted into human QA. Those senior coders cant shift back to doing Junior coder work when the bubble bursts and juniors arent readily available to start pulling functions from libraries. 

This isnt just a tech problem. It is a resource problem. "We all use AI" today is like saying "we all get 10 miles to the gallon" in 1969. Technology needs raw material and that raw material may not be so plentiful in a year from now. Not to say in 1971 we went back to using horses, but how engines used oil sure did change. 

If the development industry is the engine, and AI is the oil, that means we should see a push to get the same amount of work from half the amount of AI. "We all use AI" becomes "We use a lot less AI than they do". That is quite the different tune. Eventually it became "We dont use oil" and eventually it will become "We dont use LLMs".