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Bruno Ferreira Social Links Navigation Contributor Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.
-Fran- As a Dev Lead myself and working with agents in several areas of the business and SDLC now, it's really amazing how well it works when you know what you're doing. It's a shame the CEOs and such have given the technology such a bad reputation, but it definitely works. From what Linus needs to deal with and all the Kernel maintainers, the agents (or just multiple AI agents analysis) can help so much to diagnose and troubleshoot. Be it local models or paid cloud ones, you can choose how to go about it, but in 2026, we need to get comfortable as software workers to understand and embrace how to use AI to our benefit. It's here to stay and saying otherwise won't change reality. Not a paid advertisement either, LOL. I just find that, in late 2026, the assistants are working very close to "as originally intended" (or envisioned), which is great. Regards. Reply
bill001g -Fran- said: As a Dev Lead myself and working with agents in several areas of the business and SDLC now, it's really amazing how well it works when you know what you're doing. It's a shame the CEOs and such have given the technology such a bad reputation, but it definitely works. From what Linus needs to deal with and all the Kernel maintainers, the agents (or just multiple AI agents analysis) can help so much to diagnose and troubleshoot. Be it local models or paid cloud ones, you can choose how to go about it, but in 2026, we need to get comfortable as software workers to understand and embrace how to use AI to our benefit. It's here to stay and saying otherwise won't change reality. Not a paid advertisement either, LOL. I just find that, in late 2026, the assistants are working very close to "as originally intended" (or envisioned), which is great. Regards. I agree it seems to be a great tool but will this be true when the AI companies charge enough to even break even. First the AI companies have to stop expanding with no plan as when enough is enough. After that they have to find a way to pay back all the money they spent as well as the huge profit the AI bros who have been funding this expect. I have seen estimates they have to charge 10 times what they currently do but that is also assuming that some of less well off AI companies don't just go bankrupt. We likely will know much more once some of these AI companies actually go public and they have to report earning in a way required by the stock market. Reply
me-three bill001g said: I agree it seems to be a great tool but will this be true when the AI companies charge enough to even break even. First the AI companies have to stop expanding with no plan as when enough is enough. After that they have to find a way to pay back all the money they spent as well as the huge profit the AI bros who have been funding this expect. Stop chasing the "evil AI companies" bogeyman narrative. All companies want to make as much money as they can. Ironically enough, thanks to the Chinese, (US) AI companies have low-cost competition that at this point is almost as good, and cheap. So we'll have cheap AI going forward. That's the reality. Stop whining about "'what companies want to charge." I don't give a patootie for Altman or Huang or any of the tech bros. But they do what they need for their respective companies, which is to gain market share and give stakeholders ROI. It's capitalism. We've all benefited from the cheap goods (up until recently anyway), and now we're seeing the downside of demand/supply. Companies will go where the money is. Crying for socialism–forget profits, take care of me first–ain't going to do squat. Reply
DougMcC me-three said: Stop chasing the "evil AI companies" bogeyman narrative. All companies want to make as much money as they can. Ironically enough, thanks to the Chinese, (US) AI companies have low-cost competition that at this point is almost as good, and cheap. So we'll have cheap AI going forward. That's the reality. Stop whining about "'what companies want to charge." I don't give a patootie for Altman or Huang or any of the tech bros. But they do what they need for their respective companies, which is to gain market share and give stakeholders ROI. It's capitalism. We've all benefited from the cheap goods (up until recently anyway), and now we're seeing the downside of demand/supply. Companies will go where the money is. Crying for socialism–forget profits, take care of me first–ain't going to do squat. You nailed it. Whatever the AI companies might -like- to charge, the reality is that they won't be able to sell anything consequential at more than maybe 2x the Chinese baseline. Cheap tokens are here to stay, the frontier labs can sell a better product for a modest price delta. There will be a lot of parallels with the car market. The best sellers go for around 40k. And yes, premium car makers can sell at the 80k price point, and uber luxury vehicles can get 200k+ but the sales volume at either of those price points is tiny. Reply
ejolson In my opinion, unless something weird happens with a war, the progress being made with hardware to reduce power consumption and increase efficiency will soon bring the real cost of local and cloud-based AI inference down to realistically sustainable levels. It's difficult to wait, however, as I'd definitely prefer a locally hosted solution now. Reply
bill001g me-three said: Stop chasing the "evil AI companies" bogeyman narrative. All companies want to make as much money as they can. Ironically enough, thanks to the Chinese, (US) AI companies have low-cost competition that at this point is almost as good, and cheap. So we'll have cheap AI going forward. That's the reality. Stop whining about "'what companies want to charge." I don't give a patootie for Altman or Huang or any of the tech bros. But they do what they need for their respective companies, which is to gain market share and give stakeholders ROI. It's capitalism. We've all benefited from the cheap goods (up until recently anyway), and now we're seeing the downside of demand/supply. Companies will go where the money is. Crying for socialism–forget profits, take care of me first–ain't going to do squat. This might be true but then we get the alternative the AI companies take down the economy and nobody has jobs to pay for the cheap china tokens. I could care less if it was just openai or even nvidia that failed but all these large companies have lots of shady deals where they sell/lend equipment for a percentage of the ai company. You also have google, microsoft, amd etc that have massive debt relating to AI. Then you have investment places like softbank selling bonds that they then "invent" in these ai data centers. It is not just these you have very large investment firm that are investing things like teacher pension funds into these AI companies or even in so called safe stocks like microsoft. It will be a much better option if the AI companies find a way to recover their costs. Reply
Darkbreeze Admin said: Linus Torvalds thinks that AI fixes drove most of the progress in Linux kernel 7.4rc2 — BPF saw more AI-written fixes than bug reports, possibly indicating a tidal shift Linus Torvalds says that AI fixes drove most of the progress in latest Linux kernel : Read more Mmmm. I think I have to not say anything about this, because if I did, bad things will follow. But, no. Reply
Arkitekt78 Its fun to read comments and see just how little people still understand about AI… Reply
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linus-torvalds-says-that-ai-fixes-drove-most-of-the-progress-in-latest-linux-kernel-bpf-saw-more-ai-written-fixes-than-bug-reports-possibly-indicating-a-tidal-shift-for-open-source-maintainers-tired-of-flood-of-junk-reports#main
- https://futureplc.com/privacy-policy/
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- NVIDIA Expands Open Source Commitment With OpenShell Donation and New AI Infrastructure
Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.