[xnorswap]

The difference is, for the claims of blockchain, it was trivially easy to look at and say, "This could have been a database".

Almost every single blockchain "product" (outside of the peer-to-peer trustless currency ) could have been a database.

This time the cost of entry of small software products has cratered.

For example, I was able to knock up a tool for a guide-maker for a niche game I play that gets about 500 peak daily players on steam.

The entire motivation for the tool is because I personally struggle to follow their well written guide. It takes a reasonable amount of focus and care to adjust a bunch of settings between "runs" based on the guide as written. Getting one of these wrong can set you back a bunch of time without even realising what went wrong.

These settings have an import/export feature in game, but that only allows for a few saved presets, and isn't easy to share.

So I've made a tool that lets people create, organise and share these presets.

Literally the only user is likely to be this single guide maker. Possibly a few others might use it to consume their guides.

Without claude-code, it would never have been reasonable for me to invest the time to make the tool. It would have been an idle dream sitting on my "I wish I had the discipline to make this" pile.

But I don't have the discipline to make that kind of project. I'm too easily distracted, and I'd have got bored of the idea before I'd finished establishing all the boilerplate, let alone before ironing out all the bugs. I also don't have the front-end talent to make things look pretty with CSS.

The LLM doesn't get demotivated. It doesn't get bored, and compressed the building of the prototype down to a day or two. Enough to keep my interest until feedback arrived. A week later, and it's shipped with 50+ issues raised and fixed.

[1dom]

> The difference is, for the claims of blockchain, it was trivially easy to look at and say, "This could have been a database".

Yes, and it's trivial now to look at so many LLM startups and say "that could be a complex if/else statement" or "that could be an Alexa skill" or "I can do that already with my mobile phone".

Everything you've just described about the impact of the friction of you doing your work, and how AI has solved that, is essentially what crypto promised and delivered for a certain subsect of finance, which is why crypto still has market caps in the trillions.

AI will do the same, make a notable change on a certain sub sector of work.

My point isn't that AI is useless, it isn't that it won't add value. It's hugely valuable and will change the world in way people don't even realise, just like dotcom and crypto did and do. Right now though, the disruption and investment is disproportionate and speculative, which is why it has parallels to crypto and dotcom.

[xnorswap]

Crypto only looked like it solved friction in places with messed up banking.

To people in the EU/UK who had free faster payments before Bitcoin was a thing, it never looked like an improvement at all.

The solution expensive and slow banking was always political, not technical.

Crypto was purely speculative, because it was never solving real problems.

I'm not speculating about problems being solved, I'm out there solving real problems. No-one in "blockchain" ever got to say the same. It was always a promise of things being better. And for many people, things already were better than what was being promised.

[1dom]

> Crypto only looked like it solved friction in places with messed up banking.

AI only solved friction in places work messed up, like giving developers enough time to program stuff.

> To people in the EU/UK who had free faster payments before Bitcoin was a thing, it never looked like an improvement at all.

To tech companies who were already content with their development team's velocity, AI never looked like an improvement at all.

> The solution expensive and slow banking was always political, not technical.

The solution to developers not coding fast enough was always political, not technical.

> Crypto was purely speculative, because it was never solving real problems.

AI was purely speculative, because it was never solving any problems. (Sorry, I have to point out here you said higher up a bunch of problems that Crypto was solving, and now you're saying how it was also speculative, which is the parallel between crypto that you were trying to argue against).

> I'm not speculating about problems being solved, I'm out there solving real problems. No-one in "blockchain" ever got to say the same. It was always a promise of things being better. And for many people, things already were better than what was being promised.

Again, either you're right above when you said crypto solved problems where banking was bad, or you're right here where you're saying blockchain never solved anything.

You're going round in circles trying to find a way that AI isn't like crypto whilst giving more examples of how AI is like crypto.

Remittance, micropayments, unbanked people, unstable economies: all of these did, can and do have problems solved by blockchain.