remich

One of them (Instinct) saved me from having to pay a cancellation fee on a restaurant reservation when it noticed I had accidentally booked the reservation for the week before I was going to be in that city. It proactively reached out to me to suggest I check on it.

I would have figured it out eventually on my own - but likely not until my calendar fired a "time to leave" notification and then I'd have to pay the cancellation fee and place an awkward call to the restaurant.

lol no they didn't

I loved this game. One of my favorite memories from being a kid was playing either Pirates or the gold edition remaster on my sega genesis via a cartridge that had a proto-Netflix for games service on it. The cartridge had a coax port on the back that you ran a cable from the cable company into. You got a menu of like 30 games that rotated every month and you could download them to the cartridge to play them. Pirates and the sega version of Shadowrun were the two that I wore out.

Reminds me of how Shake Shack got rid of all of their peanut butter milkshakes years ago because one single person complained that their child with a peanut allergy couldn't have them.

Yeah I worry about this too. I have a remote agent that writes PRs for my job, and at the request of other devs I implemented a simplified writing skill that does the technical english thing mentioned elsewhere in these comments. It's definitely easier to read and the other devs seem to like it, so I'm okay with keeping it, but I haven't changed my personal claude settings because I never had a problem with the density of the output myself. Probably a side effect from having a multi-disciplinary background.

Yeah the rose colored glasses some people seem to have about how fun doing everything by hand was in the past and how well most people did those things continues to astonish me

It's also not $1,500 per month per engineer. It's that per month per engineer per tool. Which means it could easily be at least $3,000 (Claude Code and Cursor) or $4,500 if Codex was also an option on top of those two.

And as you have written on your blog it's a soft cap that can be exceeded with justification.

No reason to doubt his journalistic integrity? He's not a journalist for starters. He's a PR flack who does PR for AI startups on the side while blogging on substack. There is every reason to doubt his journalistic integrity.

Perhaps they aren't, but not currently viable !== always unviable.

Because it doesn't. Not for the tasks where using Opus instead of a lower tier model is appropriate, at any rate. Benchmarks show this, as do revealed preferences of actual users. To believe that Qwen is as capable as Opus at 1/20 the cost you have to believe that every person who does not make the choice to use Qwen over Opus for a given task is some mix of ignorant or delusional. This is certainly an opinion you can hold about other engineers, but it's definitely a questionable one at best.

Fiduciary duty but for AI, interesting. I think there's some potential there, though of course you'll end up confronting the classic sci-fi trope of "what if the system judges what's best for the user in a way that is unexpected / harmful"? But, solve that with strong guardrails and/or scoping and you might have something.

I'm starting to get to the point where I'll only listen to AI energy use critiques if the commentator tells me up front they abstain from all forms of social media, especially video-based social media, first.

Are they? Or do you just mean that it's few and far between that we hear about them? If it's the former, I think there's a much bigger universe of this kind of stuff than most people realize. Otoh, if you're just commenting on the lack of coverage, then, yeah I agree I wish more publicity was paid to small software like this. Maybe we need a catchy term - "organic software"? "Locally grown software"?

Yeah and then when that library stops being maintained or gets taken over, everything breaks.

We're in a transition phase, but this will shake out in the near future. In the non-professional space, poorly built vibecoded apps simply won't last, for any number of reasons. When it comes to professional devs, this is a problem that is solved by a combination of tooling, process, and management:

(1) Tooling to enable better evaluation of generated code and its adherence to conventions and norms (2) Process to impose requirements on the creation/exposure of PRDs/prompts/traces (3) Management to guide devs in the use of the above and to implement concrete rewards and consequences

Some organizations will be exposed as being deficient in some or all of these areas, and they will struggle. Better organizations will adapt.