> Meeting that expectation means making LLM calls, and LLM calls cost money.

Of course, and so does everything in the software world. The point is getting the cost so low that it’s basically free. The new DS V4 Flash or the smaller Qwen3.6 models are still really expensive compared to what we were used to in the economics of software, but it’s not unreasonable to expect these costs to continue falling down.

Rough chatgpt estimate says 3-5 orders of magnitude of difference compared to a typical user interaction with a SPA (db/cache lookup, CDN…)