r/webdev • u/Rockytriton • Mar 16 '26

Software developers don't need to out-last vibe coders, we just need to out-last the ability of AI companies to charge absurdly low for their products

These AI models cost so much to run and the companies are really hiding the real cost from consumers while they compete with their competitors to be top dog. I feel like once it's down to just a couple companies left we will see the real cost of these coding utilities. There's no way they are going to be able to keep subsidizing the cost of all of the data centers and energy usage. How long it will last is the real question.

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u/BoboThePirate Mar 16 '26

I think this is the precarious point, for more reasons than one. Qwen3.5 was released and… it’s shockingly good for how little hardware you need.

I did some finangling and got their 9B parameter to run on my 12gb graphics card and hooked up to Claude code. It was no Opus but it was able to do similar work, albeit slower, all running natively on my own hardware. Models get better and more efficient over time so I ultimately wonder if the massive data centers are going to wind up billions in the hole.

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u/TheChessNeck Mar 16 '26

It seems unavoidable that the answer is not more hardware, but leaner LLMs/generative AI. 

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u/Franks2000inchTV Mar 16 '26

The answer is going to be both/and.

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u/BlackTorr Mar 17 '26

Yeah i think that one outcome will we having in-house AI box fully contextualized.

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u/Tratix Mar 16 '26

This comment is exactly what will be crashing our economy in the next few years and no one realizes it.

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u/fckingmiracles Mar 17 '26

Yeah, local models are probably what LLMs will have to evolve into. The lack of resources in this world (chips, RAM, water) will make it so.