Yeah, this gamer conspiracy theory never made sense to me.

Also, if gamers demand infinitely improving graphics so much that they would rather pay for cloud gaming than relax their expectations and be happy with, say, current gen graphics, then that is more a claim about modern self-pwned gamer behavior than megacorp conspiracy.

But I don't buy that either. The biggest games on Steam Charts and Twitch aren't AAA RTX 5090 games.

> there's no reason for companies to drop prices

Competition.

Maybe the top 15,000 PyPi packages isn't the best way to measure this?

Apparently new iOS app submissions jumped by 24% last year:

> According to Appfigures Explorer, Apple's App Store saw 557K new app submissions in 2025, a whopping 24% increase from 2024, and the first meaningful increase since 2016's all-time high of 1M apps.

The chart shows stagnant new iOS app submissions until AI.

Here's a month by month bar chart from 2019 to Feb 2026: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1020964/apple-app-store-...

Also, if you hang out in places with borderline technical people, they might do things like vibe-code a waybar app and proudly post it to r/omarchy which was the first time they ever installed linux in their life.

Though I'd be super surprised if average activity didn't pick up big on Github in general. And if it hasn't, it's only because we overestimate how fast people develop new workflows. Just by going by my own increase in software output and the projects I've taken on over the last couple months.

Finally, December 2025 (Opus 4.5 and that new Codex one) was a big inflection point where AI was suddenly good enough to do all sorts of things for me without hand-holding.

The upside of Nix config is that it's the state of my system in a declarative config file.

I have these packages installed and these firewall settings and these users with these permissions and this folder served over Samba and these hotkeys that do these things and these Obsidian vaults synced over SyncThing and these devices in my SyncThing network and Neovim installed with these plugins and ...

This is difference between me and a non-nix user, not whether we can rattle off the exact state of our live system from memory.

The non-nix user has to query live system state, if such query tools even exist for their question, and I get to read a config file. And I get to maintain my system config in git, and I get to deploy my config on all of my machines.

NixOS is high-level declarative, so you're reading high-level config diffs when the AI agent is pitching changes.

Unless you're brand new to Linux or computing, it's not a mystery what a given nix config change is ever doing.

You can probably guess what this does:

You don't have Claude Code git clone nixpkgs and home-manager for local reference?

I feel you on the nix store + nix eval death loop, though it gleans real info. If I weren't on the Claude Max plan I'd probably feel more of the pain. And context is now 1MM tokens which means you're not running out just as it's starting to piece things together, heh.