What I think is also good about the piece is that it shows how using this tech eventually funnels people down a particular direction. This is captured also by this exchange on lobste.rs: https://lobste.rs/s/7d8dxv/i_used_ai_it_worked_i_hated_it#c_7jirfk

The story that people start with vs where they go is very different:

- They're really just for experts, and are assistants, they don't write the code for you
- Okay the write a lot of the code for me, but I personally don't commit anything without reviewing
- YOLO mode

Which eventually leads you to becoming the drinky bird pressing the Y key from that Simpsons episode. (Funnily enough I wrote that in my comment on lobste.rs in reply to someone else before I had even gotten to the point where I saw that @mttaggart literally had that gif)

And at that point, you're checked out. All that's left is vibes.

And unfortunately, these systems don't survive that point very well. And neither do you, in your skills and abilities.

There are a lot of other concerns but I think since a lot of people on the fediverse are opposed to these tools, they might not be very familiar with where they're currently at ability-wise. @mttaggart provides a good description that they *are* capable of solving many problems you put in front of them... and that doesn't remove the other problems they generate or involved in their process.

The slop part isn't just the individual outputs, but the cumulation, and the effect on society itself.

Is that pushing the goalposts? It may be. I think "slop" used to be easier to dismiss when it came to code because it was obviously bad. Now when it's bad, it's non-obviously bad, which is part of its own problem. And cognitive debt, deskilling, and etc don't get factored into the quality of output aspect.

But unfortunately, the immediate reward aspects of these things are going to make it hard for society to recognize.

@cwebber

It kind of feels like its going to something big happening in the press to get people to stop.

I was thinking an AI caused Therac 25, but maybe a copilot worm that wipes all windows 11 computers might get some outlawing AI code legislation.

@alienghic @cwebber

The thing most likely to get people to stop is the end of the massive subsidies for its use that the VCs are currently pouring in.

Already firms are starting to panic a little about token use for things like Claude Code, and are putting limiters in their workers that really defeat the purpose of all of the "YOU MUST USE THIS OR BE FIRED" diktats. But operating indefinitely at those prices will bankrupt Anthropic soon.

So at some point the private equity love affair with everything AI will dry up (possibly because of a Iran war-induced financial crisis), and at that point it's going to be "my org can spend $50k annually on my personal Claude tokens to make me 20% more productive . . . or it could just hire a junior dev?"

There's a chance they manage to optimize this, or get it to work using a lighter weight model. But I think it's unlikely.

@mirth @alienghic @cwebber

So far, from what I've seen, any time one of the subscription AI places put up their prices to something resembling actual operating costs (nevermind paying back gigantic sunk capital costs), users have screamed and then bolted.

Honestly, doing the really heavy duty Claude Code stuff that's getting pushed now will easily run to $50k per developer at current costs. And no, I don't see that as something that enterprises will ultimately be willing to swallow. Nor do I see a path for them to get the GPU cycle burn down easily.

@mirth @alienghic @cwebber

What downward trend in average model complexity? What downward trend in energy consumption? They're both going up! Nobody can get the cost of inference to go down outside of going with discount models like Deepseek which are okay for spouting text but you can't get anywhere near the code quality of something like Claude Code (and even with CC, as the OP link says, quality is still something that only works well in certain languages and in certain situations, with lots and lots of guard rails).

Ed Zitron isn't everyone's cup of tea, but he's been watching the finances of this for a while and there's absolutely no sign of the burn rate slowing down or the cost of inference dropping.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-subprime-ai-crisis-is-here/

@mirth @alienghic @cwebber

Anthropic gets some credit for getting Claude Code to actual usability and decent code if you spend enough time scolding and cajoling the model and manually forcing it through various code quality assurances. But they're not doing it on cheap models, they're doing it on the biggest, most expensive models which require the biggest and most expensive GPUs. You can't get those results out of Deepseek or Ollama or any of the smaller, cheaper models. The code quality goes right back into the toilet, no mater what guard rails you put on it.

Given the horrific mess that is the Claude Code source code (see this megathread for a walk through the chaos fractal that is Claude Code https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116324676116121930) it's possible that they could tighten the hell out of it and clean up some of the immense noise in it to get some efficiency. But then what does that say about Claude Code's code quality?

@mirth @alienghic @cwebber

As for the custom chips, I'm not sure how much more customized you can make a chip for ML models than what NVIDIA is cranking out, but at the very least here's what's going on with Microsoft's attempts to get Azure to work on smaller hardware. This is a really sobering read from a former MS system engineer.

Certainly, the capability of ARM chips to really change cloud computing if someone can get the ultra-efficient ones to scale up shouldn't be overlooked. And someone else who isn't Microsoft will probably figure it out (although AWS in particular is also staggering under its immense technical debt right now).

But there is just one titanic mess after another under the hoods of the major tech firms burning hundreds of billions of VC dollars right now.

https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion