You know what happened when a PC broke? You know what happens at a construction site when the excavator breaks down?
Exactly nothing — and that's okay.
I’m not an AI-maximalist, but “work a few days with AI and the rest of the month without because of cost” sounds literally crazy to me. (If you think AI is low/zero/negative net value, don’t do the first half; if it has net value, don’t do the second half.)
Right now, LLMs are the worst they'll ever be, but imagine what they will be like at the peak: Anything you want to code, coded instantly. Not waiting for code to stream in or wait hours for some agents to crunch through loops and planned: it just appears on the screen instantly like the way a webpage loads. Then imagine it can be done locally, on your device. Need an entire new custom operating system from scratch for some obscure hardware? Done. Here it is.
That's going to be like pure crack to anyone who needs to do absolutely anything. That's going to be like our generation's version of "today's supercomputers will someday be in everyone's pocket".
if i’m not mistaken, in the past, people had limited time on “the mainframe”. so eventually they brought in what would be the equivalence of a local model… small computers that could do smaller tasks locally so they didn’t have to keep shelling out money to the mainframe gods and be handcuffed for usable time.
i could absolutely be mistaken that this is how it worked, it was before my time. but this is how people explain it worked for them.
i don’t think most work gives a shit about soa. smaller repeatable tasks can absolutely be run just fine on smaller local models. sure, we’ll upgrade models occasionally just like we went from suitcase sized laptops to whatever we use today.
this idea the hypedorks are pushing that soa is the only way is hilarious. hobbyists spend stupid money on classic cars, tools for woodworking, or whatever. spending money to do a hobby at home has never stopped wonks and their hobbies and businesses will do the same, spend to run models locally.
the sooner the hypeTrash does what hype always does, fades to irrelevance, the sooner we can get back to work.
cebert•42m ago
I’ve learned how to fully embrace agentic tooling to do tasks like keeping up with vulnerability reports, initially triaging defects that come in, etc. It would be hard for me to do things the old way at this point when I know tools are available that could make me more productive for a particular category of tasks.
My employer is considered capping all engineers at $200 or $500/mo of token spend depending on level. I regularly spend over $1k/mo today, but believe I can make a strong business justification for the value those tokens are creating.
At this point, I think engineers may be asking what token budgets are when considering new roles.
alainrk•26m ago
theChris-in•24m ago
neaden•20m ago
andriy_koval•16m ago
pdhborges•15m ago
neaden•5m ago
the__alchemist•7m ago
Generic CRUD/Config stuff I do for work (and assume most software jobs entail? Maybe not correct) doesn't use a significant amount of tokens.
monkeydust•4m ago