4 ms·

Tulips sales also skyrocketed. Seriously, what value are tokens providing other than justifying layoffs. Concretely. Today. Not in the speculating scenario tha

by hirako2000 7mo ago

Tulips sales also skyrocketed. Seriously, what value are tokens providing other than justifying layoffs. Concretely. Today. Not in the speculating scenario that cardiologist could be replaced with models. We see this new trend of agentic coding, again a promise software will be written that way going forward, despite the number of fiasco already experienced when trusting a model turned bad. The use case may provide value, but right now all it does is fullfil the push for token consumption all these AI leaders are advocating for.

Throaway1975123 7mo ago
Tulips had literally no economic value. LLM's do.
- drakythe 7mo ago
  I say this as someone who has used them to boilerplate/scaffold a bit of code by this point: Economic Value of LLMs is debatable, if only because they're being too broadly applied.
  - Throaway1975123 7mo ago
    Debatable sure. Not 0. Tulips are 0. They add nothing to anyone's output. LLM's are not. LLM's are not tulips.
    - skeeter2020 7mo ago
      This is changing the narative. Nobody really cares about tulips and some dumb throwaway comparison. Unless LLMs are worth an awful lot the math here does not make sense. That is both debatable and important.
      - Throaway1975123 7mo ago
        No it isn't changing the narrative. Tulip bulbs were a huge bubble based on speculation, completely. No one ever used a tulip to create a piece of software, or anything else. Their economic value was precisely 0. The whole thing was based on a bubble. LLM's may be IN a bubble, but they aren't tulips.
      - hirako2000 7mo ago
        Since I brought up the tulips: People do care about Tulips. They do have value. So do LLMs. How many people will remain willing to pay for them, and how much, is what we call speculation.
gruez 7mo ago
>Seriously, what value are tokens providing other than justifying layoffs. Concretely. Today. It's adding tests for me and doing medium complexity refactors that I'd otherwise have to spend hours on
- michaelcampbell 7mo ago
  Same, and constructing at least drafts of huge documents that I can iteratively fine-tune that have (at least last week) saved me 10's of hours. And based on reality (code) rather than my feelz of what I vaguely remember the code to have been doing in some long past.
- aiedwardyi 7mo ago
  [flagged]
- datsci_est_2015 7mo ago
  These example put in the category of “best IDE ever created, by a wide margin” - but not “replacement for the programming workforce”.
sempron64 7mo ago
It's ridiculous to call this tulips, in the sense of a speculative asset whose price depends on resale. A more similar recent example is the dotcom boom and bust based on building internet infrastructure, or the 2008 crash which was based on cyclical infrastructure overinvestment. These crashes were characterized by demand growth not keeping up with investment because the target markets were tapped out. Not clear when we'll get there with AI. The consumer market seems saturated on chatbots but we're not even close to saturated for b2b or self driving for example. And this discounts other new technological offerings which may unlock larger consumer markets (products where people are willing to pay $100 a month instead of 10 or 20) All that said the dotcom boom is extremely analogous and that crash was quite bad.
- skeeter2020 7mo ago
  dotcom was maybe 100B a year focused on the US and mostly VCs. AI is perhaps 250B global VC (with more than half of ALL VCs concentrated in one sector) and another 800B+ from non-VC. These numbers are basically a guess but structurally we are set up for something much, much worse.
  - infecto 7mo ago
    But unlike the dot com boom, demand for tokens has not let up and there is increasing demand. I don’t know where it falls, certainly companies don’t get or right and they either over or under build. With the current demand rate changes it’s hard to understand why you would stop building today.
    - fsloth 7mo ago
      Yeah, this is the difference. 2000's tech bubble was caused among other things over-investment to infrastructure and technology that had no users yet. Totally different setup. Does not mean AI boom will not turn to bust, but weak analogues generally don't help with understanding complex systems.
    - hirako2000 7mo ago
      Demands for tokens exists yes. On one side you have huge demand for the infinitely subsidized tokens so that people can post a "unique" illustration when posting on social media, along with the text itself even. On the other end we have professionals happy to pay a subscription for heavier use, to build something in the hope to sell it. I figured I don't believe in value when my dad explained to me his mate fired his team once he realised he could just pay 20 bucks for his Gemini account and run his business. I asked, do you call this value add? He said it must be, since he can produce the same output with no staff. There is a confusion between profiting from a circumstance and value creation. You create value if, say, you cure a disease. That it takes you an army of staff or extract maximum profit from it is just a feasibility formula. That you make the cure more affordable is value creation. That you cure the same disease but increase your profit doesn't create any value, except to yourself, for a while
rhaen 7mo ago
Tulip futures skyrocketed, it was economic speculation on a useless asset, not supply and demand. Crypto is the analogy, not AI. Given that the major AI labs other than GDM are private, this is even more true. Agentic coding absolutely blew up from demand, users are not being tricked into paying $200 a month, and they’re not complaining about hitting rate limits because it’s useless.
- aurareturn 7mo ago
  users are not being tricked into paying $200 a month I can't believe people actually believe that people and companies are tricked into paying for tokens. My $20 Codex subscription is so useful, I can easily see myself paying $200 for it. This belief is so common amongst AI collapse people online. I'm guessing these people have only used free ChatGPT or worse, they use Windows and get Copilot shoved down their throats? Meanwhile, I'm flying around with a $20 Codex subscription doing everything from writing code, analyzing stocks, coming up with ideas, etc.
  - aiedwardyi 7mo ago
    [flagged]
  - fsloth 7mo ago
    I'm paying $20 for Codex and $90 for the Claude Max plan. They are a "pry from my cold dead fingers" product for me. IMO if someone tried this tech last time 6 months ago, or their only exposure is eg. via MS copilot, they do have a rational reason for skepticism. No technology of this complexity has improved this rapidly in my memory (well, ok, we had the CPU speed races from 90's to early 2000's).
    - BirAdam 7mo ago
      The CPU speed race might be the most apt comparison I've yet heard. From the 80486 to AMD Athlon64 X2 and much of that progress was enabled by better EDA being run on the more powerful CPUs being made with each improvement. Now, we have better models helping to create even better models.
infecto 7mo ago
I know there is a large force on HN that want to deny the value of tokens and I know it’s anecdotal but the writing is on the wall. If it’s not valuable to your workflow today it will be soon. I already have tests being written, automated hooks into bugs where an initial PR gets generated with a potential fix. It’s far from perfect but junior engineers are far less productive.
- rileymichael 7mo ago
  > there is a large force on HN that want to deny the value of tokens there is an even larger force on HN that financially _needs_ the value of tokens to be inflated (so much so that bots have overwhelmed the site)
  - infecto 7mo ago
    That’s not me. I am simply an engineer who gets a ton of value out of these tools.
    - eproxus 7mo ago
      That’s exactly what a bot would say ;-)
  - therealdrag0 7mo ago
    Really? Do you think there are more bots and employees of AI stakeholder companies than there are vanilla engineers on the site?
    - rileymichael 7mo ago
      by far. at this point there are very few tech companies without exposure to AI
vekker 7mo ago
> Seriously, what value are tokens providing other than justifying layoffs Like the OP said, it's incredible how polarizing this debate is. When I read comments like yours, I feel like a significant part of the global workforce in IT must be living on another planet? Or they never really used Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, ... intensively before because of company policies? I legitimately am at least 10x more productive than a year ago, and I can prove it in number of commits and finished monetizable features developed per day. Obviously my workflows still very much require an active, constantly context-switching human-in-the-loop, but to me there's absolutely no question both output volume & quality have skyrocketed.
- classified 7mo ago
  > 10x more productive That claim is totally worthless without you providing concrete information how you measured that.
  - hirako2000 7mo ago
    And that's my point about value. That engineers can spit out far more code, or that they don't have to think much is surely precious convenience. Value add so far lacks evidence. Layoffs. It justifies them to the public. I'm not certain it grants them as it contradicts a principle of enterprise: scale, as much as you possibly can. If tokens provided value today, we would be hiring more engineers to review their output and put things together.
  - vekker 7mo ago
    I literally wrote how I measure this in the post you are replying to: #commits which is admittedly a worthless proxy for productivity, so, more importantly, number of finished production-ready features delivered. That number is at least tenfold of what it was before, simply because I can run a lot of gruntwork in parallel now without wasting brainpower and focus on that stuff.
- Throaway1975123 7mo ago
  I created 5 websites this year and am working on 3 prototype games. For free. Without any knowledge of coding beforehand.
matheusmoreira 7mo ago
> Seriously, what value are tokens providing other than justifying layoffs. Concretely. Today. Claude helped me implement a ridiculous amount of features in my programming language. It's helped me migrate the heap to an easily moveable index-based object space. It's helped me implement generators. It's helped me implement a new memory allocator. It's helped me fix a ridiculous amounts of bugs and make a huge number of small improvements everywhere. Its ability to provide me repository wide code review was a game changer for a solo developer like me. And it's doing so much more than that. I got more things done in the past few weeks than previous months even though I'm evaluating, learning, understanding and rewriting the AI output. It's actually addictive to build things with Claude. The usage limits are starting to make me anxious, just like withdrawal syndrome. I applied for their open source max subscription program even though I'm too small for it because who knows, I might get in anyway and it costs nothing. AI is quite literally a world changing technology. I hope the open models keep steadily progressing and that hardware remains available to all so we can run our own models on our own computers one day.
- Aperocky 7mo ago
  Just pay for it, think of it like college tuition. Just far cheaper (if you are in USA) and probably more useful in terms of job prospects.
  - matheusmoreira 7mo ago
    I am paying for it. I subscribed to the Pro plan about two weeks ago. The Max plan is a significant expense I can't justify. I straight up cannot afford the API prices as an individual.
3yr-i-frew-up 7mo ago
[dead]
jdmoreira 7mo ago
are you seriously comparing AI to tulips? I don't even know what to say. Even if you are very bearish about the technology certainly you can't be this detached from base reality. Yet here we are
somewhatjustin 7mo ago
> Seriously, what value are tokens providing other than justifying layoffs. Coding, writing, summarizing, translating, data analysis, customer support, test generation.
senordevnyc 7mo ago
In the last eight months, my solo SaaS has gone from $0 to $325k ARR, and growth is accelerating. I run tens of billions of tokens per month through automated pipelines for the product itself (which replaces an ultra niche human-driven process in a very non-technical industry), plus probably low billions more per month for coding, systems operation and management, data analysis, etc. And I feel like I'm just barely scratching the surface of what today's models are capable of.

Throaway1975123 7mo ago

Tulips had literally no economic value. LLM's do.

drakythe 7mo ago
I say this as someone who has used them to boilerplate/scaffold a bit of code by this point: Economic Value of LLMs is debatable, if only because they're being too broadly applied.
- Throaway1975123 7mo ago
  Debatable sure. Not 0. Tulips are 0. They add nothing to anyone's output. LLM's are not. LLM's are not tulips.
  - skeeter2020 7mo ago
    This is changing the narative. Nobody really cares about tulips and some dumb throwaway comparison. Unless LLMs are worth an awful lot the math here does not make sense. That is both debatable and important.
    - Throaway1975123 7mo ago
      No it isn't changing the narrative. Tulip bulbs were a huge bubble based on speculation, completely. No one ever used a tulip to create a piece of software, or anything else. Their economic value was precisely 0. The whole thing was based on a bubble. LLM's may be IN a bubble, but they aren't tulips.
    - hirako2000 7mo ago
      Since I brought up the tulips: People do care about Tulips. They do have value. So do LLMs. How many people will remain willing to pay for them, and how much, is what we call speculation.

gruez 7mo ago

>Seriously, what value are tokens providing other than justifying layoffs. Concretely. Today. It's adding tests for me and doing medium complexity refactors that I'd otherwise have to spend hours on

michaelcampbell 7mo ago
Same, and constructing at least drafts of huge documents that I can iteratively fine-tune that have (at least last week) saved me 10's of hours. And based on reality (code) rather than my feelz of what I vaguely remember the code to have been doing in some long past.
aiedwardyi 7mo ago
[flagged]
datsci_est_2015 7mo ago
These example put in the category of “best IDE ever created, by a wide margin” - but not “replacement for the programming workforce”.

sempron64 7mo ago

It's ridiculous to call this tulips, in the sense of a speculative asset whose price depends on resale. A more similar recent example is the dotcom boom and bust based on building internet infrastructure, or the 2008 crash which was based on cyclical infrastructure overinvestment. These crashes were characterized by demand growth not keeping up with investment because the target markets were tapped out. Not clear when we'll get there with AI. The consumer market seems saturated on chatbots but we're not even close to saturated for b2b or self driving for example. And this discounts other new technological offerings which may unlock larger consumer markets (products where people are willing to pay $100 a month instead of 10 or 20) All that said the dotcom boom is extremely analogous and that crash was quite bad.

skeeter2020 7mo ago
dotcom was maybe 100B a year focused on the US and mostly VCs. AI is perhaps 250B global VC (with more than half of ALL VCs concentrated in one sector) and another 800B+ from non-VC. These numbers are basically a guess but structurally we are set up for something much, much worse.
- infecto 7mo ago
  But unlike the dot com boom, demand for tokens has not let up and there is increasing demand. I don’t know where it falls, certainly companies don’t get or right and they either over or under build. With the current demand rate changes it’s hard to understand why you would stop building today.
  - fsloth 7mo ago
    Yeah, this is the difference. 2000's tech bubble was caused among other things over-investment to infrastructure and technology that had no users yet. Totally different setup. Does not mean AI boom will not turn to bust, but weak analogues generally don't help with understanding complex systems.
  - hirako2000 7mo ago
    Demands for tokens exists yes. On one side you have huge demand for the infinitely subsidized tokens so that people can post a "unique" illustration when posting on social media, along with the text itself even. On the other end we have professionals happy to pay a subscription for heavier use, to build something in the hope to sell it. I figured I don't believe in value when my dad explained to me his mate fired his team once he realised he could just pay 20 bucks for his Gemini account and run his business. I asked, do you call this value add? He said it must be, since he can produce the same output with no staff. There is a confusion between profiting from a circumstance and value creation. You create value if, say, you cure a disease. That it takes you an army of staff or extract maximum profit from it is just a feasibility formula. That you make the cure more affordable is value creation. That you cure the same disease but increase your profit doesn't create any value, except to yourself, for a while

rhaen 7mo ago

Tulip futures skyrocketed, it was economic speculation on a useless asset, not supply and demand. Crypto is the analogy, not AI. Given that the major AI labs other than GDM are private, this is even more true. Agentic coding absolutely blew up from demand, users are not being tricked into paying $200 a month, and they’re not complaining about hitting rate limits because it’s useless.

aurareturn 7mo ago
users are not being tricked into paying $200 a month I can't believe people actually believe that people and companies are tricked into paying for tokens. My $20 Codex subscription is so useful, I can easily see myself paying $200 for it. This belief is so common amongst AI collapse people online. I'm guessing these people have only used free ChatGPT or worse, they use Windows and get Copilot shoved down their throats? Meanwhile, I'm flying around with a $20 Codex subscription doing everything from writing code, analyzing stocks, coming up with ideas, etc.
- aiedwardyi 7mo ago
  [flagged]
- fsloth 7mo ago
  I'm paying $20 for Codex and $90 for the Claude Max plan. They are a "pry from my cold dead fingers" product for me. IMO if someone tried this tech last time 6 months ago, or their only exposure is eg. via MS copilot, they do have a rational reason for skepticism. No technology of this complexity has improved this rapidly in my memory (well, ok, we had the CPU speed races from 90's to early 2000's).
  - BirAdam 7mo ago
    The CPU speed race might be the most apt comparison I've yet heard. From the 80486 to AMD Athlon64 X2 and much of that progress was enabled by better EDA being run on the more powerful CPUs being made with each improvement. Now, we have better models helping to create even better models.

infecto 7mo ago

I know there is a large force on HN that want to deny the value of tokens and I know it’s anecdotal but the writing is on the wall. If it’s not valuable to your workflow today it will be soon. I already have tests being written, automated hooks into bugs where an initial PR gets generated with a potential fix. It’s far from perfect but junior engineers are far less productive.

rileymichael 7mo ago
> there is a large force on HN that want to deny the value of tokens there is an even larger force on HN that financially _needs_ the value of tokens to be inflated (so much so that bots have overwhelmed the site)
- infecto 7mo ago
  That’s not me. I am simply an engineer who gets a ton of value out of these tools.
  - eproxus 7mo ago
    That’s exactly what a bot would say ;-)
- therealdrag0 7mo ago
  Really? Do you think there are more bots and employees of AI stakeholder companies than there are vanilla engineers on the site?
  - rileymichael 7mo ago
    by far. at this point there are very few tech companies without exposure to AI

vekker 7mo ago

> Seriously, what value are tokens providing other than justifying layoffs Like the OP said, it's incredible how polarizing this debate is. When I read comments like yours, I feel like a significant part of the global workforce in IT must be living on another planet? Or they never really used Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, ... intensively before because of company policies? I legitimately am at least 10x more productive than a year ago, and I can prove it in number of commits and finished monetizable features developed per day. Obviously my workflows still very much require an active, constantly context-switching human-in-the-loop, but to me there's absolutely no question both output volume & quality have skyrocketed.

classified 7mo ago
> 10x more productive That claim is totally worthless without you providing concrete information how you measured that.
- hirako2000 7mo ago
  And that's my point about value. That engineers can spit out far more code, or that they don't have to think much is surely precious convenience. Value add so far lacks evidence. Layoffs. It justifies them to the public. I'm not certain it grants them as it contradicts a principle of enterprise: scale, as much as you possibly can. If tokens provided value today, we would be hiring more engineers to review their output and put things together.
- vekker 7mo ago
  I literally wrote how I measure this in the post you are replying to: #commits which is admittedly a worthless proxy for productivity, so, more importantly, number of finished production-ready features delivered. That number is at least tenfold of what it was before, simply because I can run a lot of gruntwork in parallel now without wasting brainpower and focus on that stuff.
Throaway1975123 7mo ago
I created 5 websites this year and am working on 3 prototype games. For free. Without any knowledge of coding beforehand.

matheusmoreira 7mo ago

> Seriously, what value are tokens providing other than justifying layoffs. Concretely. Today. Claude helped me implement a ridiculous amount of features in my programming language. It's helped me migrate the heap to an easily moveable index-based object space. It's helped me implement generators. It's helped me implement a new memory allocator. It's helped me fix a ridiculous amounts of bugs and make a huge number of small improvements everywhere. Its ability to provide me repository wide code review was a game changer for a solo developer like me. And it's doing so much more than that. I got more things done in the past few weeks than previous months even though I'm evaluating, learning, understanding and rewriting the AI output. It's actually addictive to build things with Claude. The usage limits are starting to make me anxious, just like withdrawal syndrome. I applied for their open source max subscription program even though I'm too small for it because who knows, I might get in anyway and it costs nothing. AI is quite literally a world changing technology. I hope the open models keep steadily progressing and that hardware remains available to all so we can run our own models on our own computers one day.

Aperocky 7mo ago
Just pay for it, think of it like college tuition. Just far cheaper (if you are in USA) and probably more useful in terms of job prospects.
- matheusmoreira 7mo ago
  I am paying for it. I subscribed to the Pro plan about two weeks ago. The Max plan is a significant expense I can't justify. I straight up cannot afford the API prices as an individual.

3yr-i-frew-up 7mo ago

[dead]

jdmoreira 7mo ago

are you seriously comparing AI to tulips? I don't even know what to say. Even if you are very bearish about the technology certainly you can't be this detached from base reality. Yet here we are

somewhatjustin 7mo ago

> Seriously, what value are tokens providing other than justifying layoffs. Coding, writing, summarizing, translating, data analysis, customer support, test generation.

senordevnyc 7mo ago

In the last eight months, my solo SaaS has gone from $0 to $325k ARR, and growth is accelerating. I run tens of billions of tokens per month through automated pipelines for the product itself (which replaces an ultra niche human-driven process in a very non-technical industry), plus probably low billions more per month for coding, systems operation and management, data analysis, etc. And I feel like I'm just barely scratching the surface of what today's models are capable of.