[danesparza]

"These articles are so off from reality to the point that it can't be taken seriously at all"

So you disagree with the quote from Feynman? (the quote that forms the basis of the article)

I'm genuinely curious to know what part of the article you feel is "so far off from reality"?

[sho]

There is no longer, in my opinion, any scope for reasonable debate that AI models like Fable 5 are net productivity increases for many, if not most, if not ALL, programming tasks. Anyone can, or should be able to, prove this to themselves in about 5 minutes.

And so if someone like the author is trying to argue the contrary, that leads me to believe they either: (1) have not bothered to spend even 5 minutes validating their belief or (2) do not care to test their beliefs against reality, for whatever reason. Either one is a bit of a red flag.

[krupan]

I just attempted to verify this myself, but they want my hard earned dollars first. I didn't see any satisfaction guarantee or anything. That already feels like a scam.

[sho]

You know, if I held an important opinion about something, and there was a fairly easy way to conclusively validate or falsify it one way or the other, and all it was going to take was a couple of bucks, I'd just pay it. Having good info about the world I live in is important to me.

Just saying.

[krupan]

So you'll buy the supplements I'm selling? They'll cure everything that ails you, I promise ;-)

[sho]

Let's try another tack. What would it take to change your mind?

[CollinEMac]

It's pre-Fable 5 but they did site a real study.

[eudamoniac]

Why do you think so many people who have used the same models you do, who are otherwise intelligent, and who should be able to prove to themselves your position in five minutes, don't?

I'm somewhat agnostic about the whole thing, and I find the utter confidence you display strange and arrogant. Some really good devs say AI is not that great. Some other really good devs say it is great. Why is one side of them automatically delusional? Could they know something you don't?

[sho]

> Why is one side of them automatically delusional? Could they know something you don't?

I wrote and deleted a couple of answers to this - they didn't satisfy, so I'll just be honest.

No, they don't know anything I don't know. There's now only one reason for denying that AI is helpful in software engineering, and that is emotional, be it fear of change or cultural point-scoring.

The only honest answer to the question, "Is modern frontier AI helpful in most software engineering?" is "Yes, of course it is." Anyone answering differently than that is, by now, simply wrong. Why they are wrong may vary, but they are wrong.

[eudamoniac]

I disagree and I think the distinction is what we mean by "helpful in software engineering".

Is Fable helpful in that it can write some code that does what I told it to do? Yes, obviously. I don't think anyone is arguing that, because it's trivial to see that if you tell a frontier model to do a coding task, it usually does it well enough.

Is Fable helpful in that over the span of six months of using it, the codebase and my brain's relation to it is in a better state than if I had not used it? Well, I don't know. In this case I understand the code less, and the code is probably in a poor state, but it is further along in the feature list. Whether that tradeoff is a net benefit to whatever metric you care about is debatable.

I think most will agree that the extreme case in which you understand zero and the codebase is spaghetti (true vibecoding), but it has a bunch of features, is not good for most professional contexts, because we have seen this results in a high bugrate and eventual loss of trust in the tool and inability for the AI to maintain invariants due to context size.

So somewhere on the spectrum between no-AI and vibecoding is probably ideal. Where on the spectrum is the argument, and everyone is going to have their own opinions based on their own domains. I don't see this as anyone being wrong or emotional.

[sho]

> it's trivial to see that if you tell a frontier model to do a coding task, it usually does it well enough

So you do not disagree? You agree 100%? Yes, it is trivial to see. Hence my near-anaphylactic reaction to articles like this, which specifically claim that it is NOT useful. Do you just mentally filter that out or something?

> Is [..] the codebase and my brain's relation to it is in a better state than if I had not used it?

But now this is a different question. It will not be the same, that's for sure. With new tools we must learn new patterns, new best practises. I have come around to the opinion that we must collectively move to a higher level of abstraction and accept that we will understand the code less - but I don't agree it must necessarily be worse. That will all depend on the new techniques we discover and apply.

> So somewhere on the spectrum between no-AI and vibecoding is probably ideal. Where on the spectrum is the argument, and everyone is going to have their own opinions based on their own domains. I don't see this as anyone being wrong or emotional.

I think that anyone planting a big flag at 0 (no AI) in 2026, with what we have available, is indeed doing it for emotional reasons, and when they claim there's no benefit being anywhere else, they're wrong. Which is what the article we're talking about is doing - hence my, and other's, scathing reaction.

[eudamoniac]

> I think that anyone planting a big flag at 0 (no AI) in 2026, with what we have available, is indeed doing it for emotional reasons

I just think there is a possibility that being on the AI spectrum is not necessarily better than being at 0. Maybe retaining maximal understanding is better in the long run, even better than minimal, supervised AI usage. Productivity in the long run might be better without it, we just don't know.

[Jtarii]

Using LLMs in a similar way to already existing IDE features like refactor, find/replace, search is unambiguously a productivity increase. Whether using them for actual task completion purposes is good or not is unknown.

But imagine that Ctrl+F was just introduced as a feature and you had a bunch of people saying "All these people saying Ctrl+F is increasing their productivity are fooling themselves", it's just a silly thing to say.

[dilyevsky]

"do not fool yourself" proceeds to fool himself... if you are honest about your bias that's still fooling yourself if your conclusions are just demonstrably wrong.

[louwrentius]

Where’s your proof? No anecdotes plz.

[dilyevsky]

Here is a TCP simulator I built using Fable 5 to reproduce BBR paper results: https://ccsim.apoxy.dev It took it ~4 hours to bang out initial version which was slightly broken then it took me another day to fix some bugs. A year ago this would take me more than a month of dedicated work, probably longer. A 50x productivity boost on pure coding tasks easily.

Try pointing Fable 5 to almost any CS paper - it can reproduce results in mere hours using maybe couple hundred bucks in retail token prices. This has been obvious to anyone caring to spent even just 30 mins for months now and the writing has been on the wall for more than a year.

[louwrentius]

1. Does this make money

2. Does this warrant the unsubsidized cost of AI?

3. Does this justify the harmful externalities of AI?

I don't need personal anecdotes. I want evidence that organisations make more money, get more efficient (and so on) due to AI. Please cite a paper.

[dilyevsky]

A lot of software projects don't make money directly. Our company makes money. This would have cost thousands of dollars paid to a contractor previously with unclear results so yes it's 100% justified.

You're citing a paper that does not reproduce in the year 2026 and a guy who built a following on doom&gloom projections with zero actual verifiable sources and demanding proof. SMH

[louwrentius]

The 2025 paper showed how people could fool themselves. How easy it seems that you fool yourself.

The 2026 paper admitted it's different and has issues.

> A lot of software projects don't make money directly. Our company makes money.

That's an evasive answer and you know it. It's about AI making an impact on the bottom line, justifying it's cost.

> A lot of software projects don't make money directly. Our company makes money. This would have cost thousands of dollars paid to a contractor previously with unclear results so yes it's 100% justified.

Thousands of dollars is pocket change even for a small company. That's not the kind of impact AI is supposed to have. You see why I'm not convinced? You also don't talk about the unsubsidised cost of AI nor the negative externalities.

[cognitiveinline]

The part that says

> AI will just be turned off.

[danesparza]

Ah - near the bottom where he is disclosing his own bias. Got it.

So do you disagree that AI companies are in very large amounts of debt? And do you also disagree that debt will have real consequences (and one of those consequences might be either the lights going out or a buyout or merger)?

[sho]

Tell me, when the dot com bubble burst, and all those debt-laden companies collapsed and had buyouts and mergers, was the internet turned off?

[danesparza]

Not at all. And to be honest, I don't hear the original author asserting that all AI will go away.

But if you have a ChatGPT plan and OpenAI is bought by another company (because they are insolvent) ... do you honestly think you will be able to continue using your service without a significant price increase?

[sho]

I suppose that would be up to the new owner? How would I know what happens to their services? You shouldn't conflate AI-the-technology with OpenAI-the-company. I'm super bullish about the tech, couldn't care less about a specific company. I mean, I hate Oracle like any other sane person, but that doesn't mean I hate databases.

I'm very confident that AI will continue to be available no matter what happens, at reasonable prices. We don't have to guess - we know what the open source models take to run, the hardware, the electricity, everything. They are served at a profit today - no-one is subsidizing them. Anyone can run GLM5.2 or (soon) K3 etc - you have capex and opex, you can serve X tokens per second, you sell them at Y price, it's just maths.

AI is a technology, not a company or group of companies.

[watwut]

Internet existed before dot com bubble.

[sho]

And AI existed before, and will continue after, the rise and/or fall of any particular company.

[watwut]

LLM not really and when we say AI today, we mean LLM.

Dot com bubble was not about the internet. Internet only facilitated it.

[hsuduebc2]

I had the same reaction. It is the same kind of argument people use to claim that computer science is useless because, “What would you do if the electricity went out?”

The same thing as you, man. Die in the chaos.

[kalkin]

> I'm quite influenced by Ed Zitron's reporting

Zitron has been predicting an imminent bubble pop since 2023 (although in less and less falsifiable terms), as OpenAI and Anthropic revenues have steadily grown 3-10x per year, but people keep listening. Zitron has done a lot to misinform the public but at some point you have to conclude it's demand-driven, and people won't re-evaluate his credibility because he tells them what they want to hear.

Useful: https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/ais-biggest-critic-has-lost...

[danesparza]

Revenue and profit are not the same.

And you didn't even mention the debt these companies have accrued in the last 3 years.

References:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/ai-tech-...

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/article/techs-ai-debt-b...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertszczerba/2026/07/17/bond-...

[kalkin]

Right, I didn't mention anything about profit or debt.

The question is whether this is a bubble that's going away - whether "AI will just be turned off". A revenue trajectory indicating a vast increase in actual consumer/enterprise usage every year indicates otherwise. This is true regardless of whether or not forward-looking investment becomes too much at some point. If CSPs or AI labs have bought more compute than they can sell at current prices, maybe they'll go bust, but at that point supply and demand mean compute and therefore AI inference becomes much cheaper, which is unlikely to make it go away.

[bwat49]

I've been seeing a lot of this in online discourse where people are like "the bubble's gonna pop and then this will all be over!"

it's a combination of wishlful thinking and straightup delusion to think that AI will just poof and disappear (maybe the specific LLM approach eventually, but not the general idea of AI/the industry/product as a whole)

[dcow]

The entire thing is an AI skeptic saying “I’m skeptical I found some outdated anecdata that supports my point”. Feynman’s quote is meant for the author of this post, not people using AI to execute better day to day. It’s not reasonable to point at a chatgpt subscription and say “look the entire industry isn’t sustainable”. We all know those are subsidized just like uber was. And there are plenty of people paying API rates for tokens and getting along just fine. Further, if there was a single point in history where an environmental concern killed an entire industry please point me to it. What happens in reality is that humans compromise and innovate under new sets of constraints.

[krupan]

"Feynman’s quote is meant for the author of this post, not people using AI to execute better day to day."

Lol! Feynman's quote is in fact for everyone. Refusing to consider that it might apply to yourself is proof of that!

[dcow]

It’s not a consideration. I am more productive with AI. Period. Maybe that’s not the reality for you, but it is for me. I don’t need a study to prove it.