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Several factors are in confluence to make this different from previous tech booms. First, it's just too much too fast. Both the companies that make AI their bu

Several factors are in confluence to make this different from previous tech booms. First, it's just too much too fast. Both the companies that make AI their business like OpenAI and the companies bolting AI onto everything have been forceful and abrasive with their pushing. Normally technology has more time to seep in and organically normalize with people for a while before the pushing begins, but this time the gas pedal was floored shortly after OpenAI had shipped a usable MVP. Second, the value is far from clear for a lot of people, partly from lazy bolt-on integrations, but also just because people don't actually want/need it for many of the tasks it's being sold for and because it's not good/reliable for some tasks. Third, as noted in the article, the surrounding environment isn't right. Many of your average people feel like the dog in the "this is fine" meme[0] and aren't really in the mood to be sold something that could ultimately further concentrate wealth and make their lives harder. It's like parking an ice cream truck in front of a burning office building and wondering why nobody running out is buying a cone. I say this as someone who finds AI useful for some things. All of this is pretty plainly visible. Either the big names in the industry are horrifically out of touch or they're pretending to not see it in hopes of faking it until they make it, I'm not sure which. [0]: https://www.npr.org/2023/01/16/1149232763/this-is-fine-meme-anniversary-gunshow-web-comic https://www.npr.org/2023/01/16/1149232763/this-is-fine-meme-...

jorts 8mo ago
Thanks for articulating exactly how I feel.
latchkey 8mo ago
The way I look at it, from a quality perspective, this is the worst it will be. I certainly won't ever go back to coding without AI. If you extrapolate from there and the general need for tokens compounding with the demand, it is only upwards, whether you agree with it or not. We can debate endlessly whether the horse and buggy is better than the car, or the cell phone will replace the film camera. But at the end of the day, history has shown that none of that matters. We're better off just agreeing to it and working to improve it.
- davidw 8mo ago
  Who are the actors working to "improve it" though? You have big tech oligarchs salivating at the idea of moar profits by firing a bunch of people. You have elected officials who might mean well but won't be able to react quickly and don't understand the nuance of a lot of tech things. You have ordinary people trying to figure out how to make use of this stuff without losing their own jobs. But they don't have a ton of influence.
  - latchkey 8mo ago
    I do agree with you, there is too much grift, but that's to be expected. I'm one of the actors and I sided with AMD early on.
  - jopsen 8mo ago
    > You have big tech oligarchs salivating at the idea of moar profits by firing a bunch of people. For big tech to start relying on vibe coding without code reviews etc is a huge risk. Big tech has so much red tabe preventing people from getting stuff done. Security reviews needed, etc. This inertia will hold back even a super intelligence from getting stuff done. Some nerds in a garage trying to apply vibe coding to a problem won't have this red tape. Red tape is necessary in big orgs because you can't have 100k people running around shipping new half broken, semi supported software with security holes. So you established release processes, approvals, code reviews, etc. All I'm saying is: big tech is also at risk of being disrupted by AI.
- hshdhdhj4444 8mo ago
  We can debate whether conventional weapons are better than nuclear weapons or not. But none of that matters. We’re better off just agreeing to it and working to improve it… The problem with your analogies are that there is no path where a constant improvement to cars leads to anything but better outcomes for human. There is no realistic or likely path where improvements to cellphones leads to anything but better outcomes for humans. However, if AI keeps getting better to the extent we can imagine, ie Super Intelligence, the outcomes are more likely to be extinction level negative than positive.
the_snooze 8mo ago
Anyone who's paid attention to the last 15+ years of tech and business knows that it's all about capture and extraction. All the feel-good language about "democratizing" tech or "making the world more open and connected" or "don't be evil" is just a smokescreen for people who want to bring about modern feudalism. It's hard to see AI as anything but the latest accelerant for that.
- jopsen 8mo ago
  We don't know if there will be software improvements leaving the AI data centers as stranded assets. We don't know if software product like Adobe suite will be irrelevant or cloned with vibe coding. The assumption that inference with sota won't be local in 5 years is not certain.
  - the_snooze 8mo ago
    Exactly, my view is intellectually honest because it's falsifiable. I would love to live in a world where tech largely respects and empowers end-users instead of trapping them in engineered dependency. Tech companies just need to act humanely. That's just not the world we live in currently.
    - tim333 8mo ago
      I'm not sure I see that with the big tech I'm an end user of, the biggest being Google. I get free search, email, youtube. It's provided a lot of value for me and never really caused problems at that end. I think the downsides of Google are more driving competitors and companies that have to pay them out of business, like for example the online travel business has suffered because they need to pay a lot to get any customers. I'm not sure what the answer is. Maybe some monopoly laws that make their service worse so others can compete?
  - hedora 8mo ago
    I think things are pretty clear. I don’t know when the markets will agree, sadly. We do know technological advancements will leave the data centers as stranded assets. There’s not enough money in the most optimistic revenue projections to pay for them, and models are simultaneously getting better and cheaper to operate. Adobe (and similar companies) will either improve or be replaced by vibe coding. I think the assumption a lot of wall street and management is making is that Adobe can replace itself with vibe coding and vibe customer support, and then not be simultaneously out-innovated by a few dozen companies founded by folks they laid off. Local inference is 6-12 months behind SOTA. If that holds, you can have a 2029 SOTA locally on a Rapberry Pi 8, or 2030 SOTA for $500/month (in 2026 dollars). If 2030 SOTA is qualitatively better at that point, then we’ll be way past AGI, and the economy will be unrecognizable.
bigstrat2003 8mo ago
> and because it's not good/reliable for some tasks. It's even worse than that. I'm not aware of any tasks which it's good at. Even after several years of effort, LLMs suck at coding, the thing they are supposedly best at. Maybe it'll get good, but right now it just isn't.
- aeon_ai 8mo ago
  If you’re not aware of what it’s good at, given what very smart people are saying and doing with it, I think you’re either not paying attention or aren’t being intellectually honest with yourself
  - jcgrillo 8mo ago
    Or those people aren't actually very smart, or they're caught up in the hype, or since they are very smart they exist in a mode where their experience doesn't translate to normal, everyday situations. It seems that AI coding tools are very sensitive to codebase structure. If you work on a monolith with relatively simple, straightforward structure this is the happy path. A bird's nest of microservices is not. If your team has taken the time and effort to structure the codebase in a way that's amenable to AI, and you invest in the tooling, and you keep up that effort over time, then AI does seem to work.. Not "10x productivity gain" as they try to sell it to us, but maybe >1.0x. It's not clear, though, that for the vast majority of developers AI provides any speedup whatsoever. That's the problem. If it only works for the top 5% or whatever, that addressable market is very, very small.
  - nunez 8mo ago
    there are a lot of smart people with eggs in this basket that stand to benefit from boosting AI hard.
  - piva00 8mo ago
    Instead of appealing to authority you could have given direct examples of how it's transformed your ways of working, that could've continued the conversation somewhere.
  - 8mo ago
JKCalhoun 8mo ago
Like your third point, I think people have "novelty fatigue". The iPod may have been the last bit of tech people actually enjoyed. Everything else seems to have come with a a lot of baggage—a heaping, helping of shit (cell phones and the internet included).

jorts 8mo ago

Thanks for articulating exactly how I feel.

latchkey 8mo ago

The way I look at it, from a quality perspective, this is the worst it will be. I certainly won't ever go back to coding without AI. If you extrapolate from there and the general need for tokens compounding with the demand, it is only upwards, whether you agree with it or not. We can debate endlessly whether the horse and buggy is better than the car, or the cell phone will replace the film camera. But at the end of the day, history has shown that none of that matters. We're better off just agreeing to it and working to improve it.

davidw 8mo ago
Who are the actors working to "improve it" though? You have big tech oligarchs salivating at the idea of moar profits by firing a bunch of people. You have elected officials who might mean well but won't be able to react quickly and don't understand the nuance of a lot of tech things. You have ordinary people trying to figure out how to make use of this stuff without losing their own jobs. But they don't have a ton of influence.
- latchkey 8mo ago
  I do agree with you, there is too much grift, but that's to be expected. I'm one of the actors and I sided with AMD early on.
- jopsen 8mo ago
  > You have big tech oligarchs salivating at the idea of moar profits by firing a bunch of people. For big tech to start relying on vibe coding without code reviews etc is a huge risk. Big tech has so much red tabe preventing people from getting stuff done. Security reviews needed, etc. This inertia will hold back even a super intelligence from getting stuff done. Some nerds in a garage trying to apply vibe coding to a problem won't have this red tape. Red tape is necessary in big orgs because you can't have 100k people running around shipping new half broken, semi supported software with security holes. So you established release processes, approvals, code reviews, etc. All I'm saying is: big tech is also at risk of being disrupted by AI.
hshdhdhj4444 8mo ago
We can debate whether conventional weapons are better than nuclear weapons or not. But none of that matters. We’re better off just agreeing to it and working to improve it… The problem with your analogies are that there is no path where a constant improvement to cars leads to anything but better outcomes for human. There is no realistic or likely path where improvements to cellphones leads to anything but better outcomes for humans. However, if AI keeps getting better to the extent we can imagine, ie Super Intelligence, the outcomes are more likely to be extinction level negative than positive.

the_snooze 8mo ago

Anyone who's paid attention to the last 15+ years of tech and business knows that it's all about capture and extraction. All the feel-good language about "democratizing" tech or "making the world more open and connected" or "don't be evil" is just a smokescreen for people who want to bring about modern feudalism. It's hard to see AI as anything but the latest accelerant for that.

jopsen 8mo ago
We don't know if there will be software improvements leaving the AI data centers as stranded assets. We don't know if software product like Adobe suite will be irrelevant or cloned with vibe coding. The assumption that inference with sota won't be local in 5 years is not certain.
- the_snooze 8mo ago
  Exactly, my view is intellectually honest because it's falsifiable. I would love to live in a world where tech largely respects and empowers end-users instead of trapping them in engineered dependency. Tech companies just need to act humanely. That's just not the world we live in currently.
  - tim333 8mo ago
    I'm not sure I see that with the big tech I'm an end user of, the biggest being Google. I get free search, email, youtube. It's provided a lot of value for me and never really caused problems at that end. I think the downsides of Google are more driving competitors and companies that have to pay them out of business, like for example the online travel business has suffered because they need to pay a lot to get any customers. I'm not sure what the answer is. Maybe some monopoly laws that make their service worse so others can compete?
- hedora 8mo ago
  I think things are pretty clear. I don’t know when the markets will agree, sadly. We do know technological advancements will leave the data centers as stranded assets. There’s not enough money in the most optimistic revenue projections to pay for them, and models are simultaneously getting better and cheaper to operate. Adobe (and similar companies) will either improve or be replaced by vibe coding. I think the assumption a lot of wall street and management is making is that Adobe can replace itself with vibe coding and vibe customer support, and then not be simultaneously out-innovated by a few dozen companies founded by folks they laid off. Local inference is 6-12 months behind SOTA. If that holds, you can have a 2029 SOTA locally on a Rapberry Pi 8, or 2030 SOTA for $500/month (in 2026 dollars). If 2030 SOTA is qualitatively better at that point, then we’ll be way past AGI, and the economy will be unrecognizable.

bigstrat2003 8mo ago

> and because it's not good/reliable for some tasks. It's even worse than that. I'm not aware of any tasks which it's good at. Even after several years of effort, LLMs suck at coding, the thing they are supposedly best at. Maybe it'll get good, but right now it just isn't.

aeon_ai 8mo ago
If you’re not aware of what it’s good at, given what very smart people are saying and doing with it, I think you’re either not paying attention or aren’t being intellectually honest with yourself
- jcgrillo 8mo ago
  Or those people aren't actually very smart, or they're caught up in the hype, or since they are very smart they exist in a mode where their experience doesn't translate to normal, everyday situations. It seems that AI coding tools are very sensitive to codebase structure. If you work on a monolith with relatively simple, straightforward structure this is the happy path. A bird's nest of microservices is not. If your team has taken the time and effort to structure the codebase in a way that's amenable to AI, and you invest in the tooling, and you keep up that effort over time, then AI does seem to work.. Not "10x productivity gain" as they try to sell it to us, but maybe >1.0x. It's not clear, though, that for the vast majority of developers AI provides any speedup whatsoever. That's the problem. If it only works for the top 5% or whatever, that addressable market is very, very small.
- nunez 8mo ago
  there are a lot of smart people with eggs in this basket that stand to benefit from boosting AI hard.
- piva00 8mo ago
  Instead of appealing to authority you could have given direct examples of how it's transformed your ways of working, that could've continued the conversation somewhere.
- 8mo ago

JKCalhoun 8mo ago

Like your third point, I think people have "novelty fatigue". The iPod may have been the last bit of tech people actually enjoyed. Everything else seems to have come with a a lot of baggage—a heaping, helping of shit (cell phones and the internet included).