[matusp]

This is a natural response to software enshittification. You can hardly find an iOS app that is not plagued by ads, subscriptions, or hostile data collection. Now you can have your own small utilities that can work for you. This sort of personal software might be very valuable in the world where you are expected to pay 5$ to click any button.

[nikisil80]

Yeah sure but have you considered that the actual cost of running these models is actually much greater than whatever cost you might be shelling out for the ad-free apps? You're talking to someone who hates the slopification and enshittification of everything, so you don't need to convince me about that. However, everything I've seen described in the replies to my initial comment - while cute, and potentially helpful on a case-by-case basis, does NOT warrant the amount of resources we are pouring into AI right now. Not even fucking close. It'll all come crashing down, taxpayers the world over will be caught with the bag in their hands, and for what? So that we can all have a less robust version of an app that already exists but that has the colours we want and the button where we want it?

If AI cost nothing and wasn't absolutely decimating our economy, I'd find what you've shared cute. However, we are putting literally all of our eggs, and the next generation's eggs, and the one after that, AND the one after that, into this one thing, which, I'm sorry, is so far away from everything that keeps on being promised to us that I can't help but feel extremely depressed.

[falloutx]

At this point it doesn't matter that much whether we use AI or not, the apps are not selling and they are being produced at an alarming rate.

The projects being submitted to product hunt is 4x the year before.

The market is shrinking rapidly because now more people make their own apps.

Even making a typo and landing on a website, there is good chance its selling more ai snake oil, yet none of these apps are feature complete and easily beaten by apps made by guys in 2010s. (tldr & sketchbook for the drawing space).

Only way to excite the investors is to fake the ARR by giving free trials and sell before the recurring event occurs.

[minimaxir]

You are attempting to move the goalposts. There are two different points in this debate:

1) Modern LLMs are an inflection point for coding.

2) The current LLM ecosystem is unsustainable.

This submission discussion is only about #1, which #2 does not invalidate. Even if the ecosystem crashes, then open-source LLMs that leverage the same tricks Opus 4.5 does will just be used instead.

[strange_quark]

But it's only an inflection point if it's sustainable. When this comes crashing down, how many people are going to be buying $70k GPUs to run an open source model?

[minimaxir]

I said open-source models, not locally-hosted models. Essentially, more power to inference-only providers such as Groq and Together AI which host the large-scale OSS LLMs who will be less affected by a crash as long as the demand for coding agents is there.

[simonw]

> When this comes crashing down, how many people are going to be buying $70k GPUs to run an open source model?

If the AI thing does indeed come crashing down I expect there will be a whole lot of second-hand GPUs going for pennies on the dollar.

[strange_quark]

Ok, and then? Taking a one time discount on a rapidly depreciating asset doesn’t magically make this whole industry profitable, and it’s not like you’re going to start running a GB200 in your basement.

[simonw]

Then I'll wait for a bunch of companies to spring up running those cheap GPUs in their data centers and selling me access to GLM-4.7 and friends.

Or I'll start one myself, if the market fails to provide!

[nikisil80]

Checked your history. From a fellow skeptic, I know how hard it is to reason with people around here. You and I need to learn to let it go. In the end, the people at the top have set this up so that either way, they win. And we're down here telling the people at our level to stop feeding the monster, but told to fuck off anyways.

So cool bro, you managed to ship a useless (except for your specific use-case) app to your iphone in an hour :O

What I think this is doing is it's pitting people against the fact that most jobs in the modern economy (mine included btw) are devoid of purpose. This is something that, as a person on the far left, I've understood for a long time. However, a lot (and I mean a loooooot) of people have never even considered this. So when they find that an AI agent is able to do THEIR job for them in a fraction of the time, they MUST understand it as the AI being some finality to human ingenuity and progress given the self-importance they've attributed to themselves and their occupation - all this instead of realizing that, you know, all of our jobs are useless, we all do the exact same useless shit which is extremely easy to replicate quickly (except for a select few occupations) and that's it.

I'm sorry to tell anyone who's reading this with a differing opinion, but if AI agents have proven revolutionary to your job, you produced nothing of actual value for the world before their advent, and still don't. I say this, again, as someone who beyond their PhD thesis (and even then) does not produce anything of value to the world, while being paid handsomely for it.

[christophilus]

> if AI agents have proven revolutionary to your job, you produced nothing of actual value for the world before their advent, and still don't.

This doesn’t logically follow. AI agents produce loads of value. Cotton picking was and still is useful. The cotton gin didn’t replace useless work. It replaced useful work. Same with agents.

[strange_quark]

> You and I need to learn to let it go.

Definitely, it’s an unhealthy fixation.

> I'm sorry to tell anyone who's reading this with a differing opinion, but if AI agents have proven revolutionary to your job, you produced nothing of actual value for the world before their advent, and still don't.

I agree with this, but I think my take on it is a lot less nihilistic than yours. I think people vastly undersell how much effort they put into doing something, even if that something is vibecoding a slop app that probably exists. But if people are literally prompting claude with a few sentences and getting revolutionary results, then yes, their job was meaningless and they should find something to do that they’re better at.

But what frustrates me the most about this whole hype wave isn’t just that the powers that be have bet the entire economy on a fake technology, it’s that it’s sucking all of of the air out of the room. I think most people’s jobs can actually provide value and there’s so much work to be done to make _real_ progress. But instead of actually improving the world, all the time, money, and energy is being thrown into such a wasteful technology that is actively making the world a worse place. I’m sure it’s always been like this and I was just to naive too see it, but I much preferred it when at least the tech companies pretended they cared about the impact their products had on society rather than simply trying to extract the most value out of the same 5 ideas.

[nikisil80]

Yeah, I do tend to have a rather nihilistic view on things, so apologies.

I really think we're just cooked at this point. The amount of people (some great friends whom I respect) that have told me in casual conversation that if their LLM were taken from them tomorrow, they wouldn't know how to do their work (or some flavour of that statement) has made me realize how deep the problem is.

We could go on and on about this, but let's both agree to try and look inward more and attempt to keep our own things in order, while most other people get hooked on the absolute slop machine that is AI. Eventually, the LLM providers will need to start ramping up the costs of their subscriptions and maybe then will people start clicking that the shitty code that was generated for their pointless/useless app is not worth the actual cost of inference (which some conservative estimates put out to thousands of dollars per month on a subscription basis). For now, people are just putting their heads in the sand and assuming that physicists will somehow find a way to use quantum computers to speed up inference by a factor of 10^20 in the next years, while simultaneously slashing its costs (lol).

But hey, Opus 4.5 can cook up a functional app that goes into your emails and retrieves all outstanding orders - revolutionary. Definitely worth the many kWh and thousands of liters of water required, eh?

Cheers.