It's six-fingered turtles all the way down

there's always going to be a need for juniors because there's no senior devs without junior devs training to become senior.

Sound like development jobs will soon be like other skilled industries (trades, healthcare, social services etc).

You always see stuff about "shortage" of workers yet everyone I know is constantly out of work, working part time/casual, stringing together multiple jobs. What the employers want is people with 20 years of experience and lots of training in there. But nobody wants to hire a fresh young person for 20 years and be paying them to upskill regularly. Older people either dont want to teach/train or it can't be integrated with their existing jobs.

Everyone wants to reap but nobody wants to sow. Employers will do anything to avoid having to invest in people because it indicates a commitment to their value that makes workers upity and demanding. Its more important that the workers feel off balance and insecure all the time.

Yeah probably a better pi setup would be to create more granular agent types. I tried creating a worker powered by deepseek but found it wasn't really that good. Something like an agent team spec (use a technical product manager agent to coordinate modules, review the worker output, and to make necessary corrections) then you could use a frontier model to plan and issue work instructions to the TPM agent

Not sure if this would be more economical in practice but would be interesting to try

Long run I think you will always need the data centers to handle big training loads but we might go back to on-prem computing for enterprises to run frontier models. Or even edge nodes that have enough muscle that folks can subscribe to locally.

Something in your city you can sub to for $30 a month that lets you run any flagship open source model could be very compelling

hardware that can run adequate local models

I don't use AI for anything except translating language. I just use the local models. I have no fucking idea how an entire language (and the info needed to properly transform to another language) can be contained in a file of 10-70mb. But it works adequately on my trashy old hardware.

Also tried a bit of text to speech, transcription and similar. Those were more of a pain in the ass and needed a lot more stuff to download and set up but it isn't clear to me if that is the nature of it or maybe the front end user experience just hasn't been polished yet. But my laptop can handle it anyway. It seems like these companies really want the SAAS model and that is directing how they build. More than it being an inherent requirement.

To me it kind of seems like most individual people have a limited set of tasks they want to accomplish so you could just have whatever you need locally. Probably could even generate a custom local model and send it updates from an interface of some kind. If you want something to write emails or whatever you have it pull and digest what it needs once and then by incremental upgrades after that.

Its hard for me to imagine individual users really need so much power from a data center because its not like you are using the whole thing yourself. Probably data centers are really for huge comprehensive tasks that humans could never do unaided like analyzing massive datasets.