What if you don’t know the problem? That’s kind of the crux of the issue here. You still need an expert operator, and at that point it is just saving some typing, but not even necessarily saving time with all the back and forth.
But those code generators were deterministic (and indeed caused huge headaches if the generated code changed between versions). Seems like a totally different thing.
Out of curiosity, do you think the decrease in revenue for your tech course business is due to lack of demand (i.e. potential customers just ask an LLM rather than learn from a course now), or due to disruption in your acquisition channel (i.e. reduced traffic from SEO to your blog due to potential customers seeing Google's LLM answers at the top of the search results page)? Like for example, do you have other marketing channels such as social media, youtube or paid ads?
I think it's both but I think the end result is less traffic means less sales.
I don't have paid ads, everything has been organic with the blog being the main funnel into everything. For quite a few years I tried creating a podcast and also have 5+ years of weekly YouTube videos but the traffic back to the courses from those are close to nothing.
Conversion percent rates haven't changed, they have remained consistent.
Thank you for sharing, I really appreciate it! I've been working on my own tech course/education platform for the past couple years, and the landscape seems to be moving beneath our feet!
Tailwind also has a compiler of sorts (so you only include in the bundle the exact styles you need) and a bunch of tooling built around it. In an alternate universe it could have been a fully paid enterprise tool, but then it might not have caught on.
The idea is that subscription businesses have churn, and if you can capture the lifetime value of a customer with your one time price, there isn't any difference (other than people feeling grateful when you add new content for "free").
My takeaway from this thread is: his theory’s great until you discover that your customers are wiling pay *so* much more.
On a more positive note, I’ve been blown away by the (largely, one conspicuous troll-like annoyance aside) positive thoughts in the comments. Maybe it’s not too late?
It is true, I paid the lifetime fee for the premium tailwind offering, and they probably could have gotten double that from me with an annual subscription instead.
"A new monk arrived at the monastery. He was assigned to help the other monks in copying the old texts by hand. He noticed, however, that they were copying copies, not the original books. The new monk went to the head monk to ask him about this. He pointed out that if there were an error in the first copy, that error would be continued in all of the other copies.
The head monk said, ‘We have been copying from the copies for centuries, but you make a good point, my son.’ The head monk went down into the cellar with one of the copies to check it against the original.
Hours later, nobody had seen him, so one of the monks went downstairs to look for him. He heard a sobbing coming from the back of the cellar and found the old monk leaning over one of the original books, crying.
He asked what was wrong.
‘The word is ‘celebrate,’ not ‘celibate’!’ sobbed the head monk."
I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable making large changes to a complex legacy code base with just an LLM. But I think an LLM could be a big help to try to understand a complex legacy code base. As long as you are verifying what it is saying (which you would naturally kind of have to for that use case).
I absolutely agree with you.
I think this quote in the article gave me the impression that they are talking more about vibe coding it at scale rather than llm assisted engineering.
"Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases. Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.’"
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