That the prevailing winners in the market are not winning based on code, but on marketing. Now amount of 'here's a cheaper knock-off' is going to overcome the scare factor. Saving money won't win any of these decision makers enough to warrant the risk of cocking up something important.

However, AI is pitching supreme bespokeness. The cover is not just about 'saving money', the emphasis is that it can be fit to your 'special' purpose.

It's all a marketing game, and India low cost labor didn't bring any marketing to the table, but the entire damn world is doing marketing for the LLM bros.

Reasoning involves an abstraction that I don't see LLMs doing. They can construct a narrative that looks like a reasoning chain, but it's not really modelling anything beyond the words itself.

For a big chunk of code this could be particularly similar, as the end result is frequently untethered from some grounded reality anyway, and getting close enough is about where the software lives.

That said, as a worker at a company that is crazy bullish on the AI tools, I too have access to Claude Code and while 'useful', it's not exactly a genius, particularly not good at just saying "I don't know".

Gave it what I thought was a cakewalk and well it was Claude Code and Opus 4.6 and by so many people's account, they 'are there'. So I come back and huzzah, all the test cases passed.... But it didn't actually work... It made a lot of mistakes and just swallowed all exceptions and errors until test cases didn't get them. It turned out what I thought was a cakewalk it only could do the lowest layer, and just fabricated some nonsense for the upper half. Had to throw out all but 3 functions as useless slop, the three functions were getting the very common lower level of the thing right, and was about 30 lines of code all said and done...

I probably could have tried to tediously explain bit by bit exactly what to do differently prompting back and forth, but it was just faster to just do the thing since I knew what to do and it's easier to do than try to convince an LLM codegen to generate the correct code in this scenario.

I kind of agree, but think AI users will face a significant fall off when the bubble pops and a lot of folks walk away from it without critically thinking about it in the same way a lot of folks walk toward it without critically thinking about it, never having 'got it' one way or the other and just following what the apparent mass opinion is.

Also, a bubble pop would likely come with price hikes for the surviving companies under more pressure to operate at a sustainable revenue instead of loss leading, and that may deter some more users.

In the wake of the dotcom boom, a lot of otherwise healthy companies walked away from this 'internet thing' even as they credibly probably should have kept with it.

Because so many people assume LLM is superseding *everything*, and need explicit reminders that not only is the 'old' way so much more efficient and simple, it's even more effective than what an LLM would do.

Amazon is selling all sorts of crazy low quality stuff from knock-off brands contributing a lot of volume. As bad as wal-mart is, even they wouldn't carry a lot of that junk on shelves.

The other thing that may play a factor is that Wal Mart is *notoriously* dickish to suppliers. Refusing to accept certain things the suppliers want to sell, demanding packages that don't make sense even as the sales prove the supplier right, wal mart keeps pushing.

Someone will probably say "something something AI" to say we could build out faster.

Further, even if the market doesn't "collapse", it would still transition to something more like a "sustaining" market rather than ever expanding buildout.

Very slow and expensive to try to solve what will, one way or another, be a temporary problem.

Yes, and that would be a plausible reason for a 'Boom', government mandates can cause these things regardless of consumer sentiment. A boom just means an expanded economic result, it does not speak to the motivation or virtue of the expansion, just that it is.

It's not ignoring it, the 'We' in that statement are the people making the policy decision. This isn't saying that consumers are deciding what to import, it's a statement of the reasoning the government expresses as they made this change.

I don't know why you are bolding that, no one is saying that ethiopians are suddenly spending money on acquiring brand new cars because of EVs.

In context it makes sense. Per the article, cars are a 1%er luxury in Ethiopia as it stands. Subsidizing gasoline was probably a strategy to try to break the chicken and egg paradox of personal transport and economic activity. Trying something to jump start *some* infrastructure that might, eventually, compete with more significant economic players. They never achieved it, with uselessly sparse adoption and infrastructure. Meanwhile, EVs represent a different potential paradigm for them, enabled by electric grid buildout and *potentially* domestic energy, rather than trying to build out fossil fuel infrastructure and dependent on foreign sources eternally. It may also not work, but it does represent a chance for focusing on grid infrastructure without the distraction of fossil fuel infrastructure only for cars.

Again, the article is just saying that the policy has driven EV proliferation in the country, not trying to say that the people are going EV crazy or anything, it's a pretty mundane story that EVs are seeing increased share because the government has stopped import of ICE.

People seem to be feeling somehow offended and upset over this, but they have nothing to do with the people of Ethiopia, and cars barely matter to Ethiopia and their gas car strategy has, by the numbers, failed. This has nearly nothing to do with other places where one can fairly complain that EV cars are a difficult choice in a nation with extensive fossil fuel infrastructure and hundreds of millions of gas cars on the road and in junkyards for repair parts.

Yeah, fretting about cars in ethiopia, based on the stated adoption rate, would be like people getting up in arms over particulars of yacht ownership in the USA.

Yeah, there's a lot of people projecting from areas with ubiquitous cars and robust fossil fuel infrastructure and can't imagine a context where combustion engines aren't as amazingly convenient. Getting upset on behalf of a population that probably mostly does not care.

Yes, and the only historical measure where it isn't is if you go way way before humans were kicking about. By any *human* history it's already too warm, and exacerbating our path toward an unfamiliar climate is not a huge comfort just because prehistoric fauna could cope on some scale, nothing to know that human civilization at our current scale can be sustained under such conditions.

Boom simply means that a product/category is seeing more popularity, no matter the reason.

The number of EVs went up by over five-fold, that is a boom. You may not *like* why it happened, but it happened.

Further given the context, I don't think it's like the people are going to call 'bullshit' or anything, the entire nation has fewer cars than you'll find in medium sized US cities. Looks like you might be over a hundred miles from the nearest gas station for most of the country. Looks like there's no such thing as convenient long-haul refueling for gas either.

Broadly we are going to see this across the board. Tech companies releasing new models that for a change are not appreciably better or even reduced specs compared to predecessors. The tech supply chain is fubar thanks to the data center black hole and companies are doing this to try to keep product on the shelves.

I've encountered this scenario across a number of teams, people pointing to a large backlog and asserting that, obviously, they need more people because that's just so much to do.

The biggest problem is that a large backlog doesn't really say anything about value of those items. Someone at some point tossed it in the pile because it's usually "free" to do so but the request really does not represent work of value to be done. A business leader sees that metric with a request for more resources, but a healthy business context and the customers and users not complaining and rightfully asks for the business case, and the project manager has no response.

Once a manager declared a need to have better "backlog hygiene" and started weekly mandatory backlog review meetings with stakeholders to actually close out issues. Issues that were ignored for over 5 years with zero activity because they were actively bad ideas or useless suddenly got the submitter fired up because we forced the discussion into the open. Hours wasted as the manager figured out why the backlog had long lived items with flags that everyone knew meant "never do it" without actually closing it, because some stakeholders would not accept "no" for an answer.

It doesn't even matter if they believe, so long as they can use it as a plausible rationale.

The layoffs are coming either way, I know quite a few higher ups that know they hired folks they didn't actually need due to FOMO during the big 2021 hiring craze for tech folks. I'm sure they are happy to have some industry wide rationale as to why it makes sense instead of admitting they hired a significant number of folks with no particular plan/business objective in mind.

At the very least, to reset some salaries that sometimes doubled or more around that time period.