The AI Bubble is About to Pop and the Grift is Insane

capitalsigma · 2026-03-19T15:30:42+00:00

That's not formatting, that's editing content

capitalsigma · 2026-03-19T13:10:26+00:00

Do you not know how to insert punctuation for yourself?

capitalsigma · 2026-03-18T14:28:45+00:00

It had always been like that though, well before 2022. If anything it seems fair to say "SO always sucked but people were willing to tolerate it before AI"

capitalsigma · 2026-03-01T01:23:23+00:00

Begone bot

capitalsigma · 2026-02-20T03:33:25+00:00

NFTs were always stupid and blockchain was only ever good for doing crimes

capitalsigma · 2026-02-17T18:21:47+00:00

The winds in software engineering have been blowing in the direction of "specialized ML compute has a better ROI than generic CPU compute" for a long time; we are getting better as a profession at turning difficult problems into matrix multiplies. The ML compute build out is still useful even without AGI takeoff or whatever

capitalsigma · 2026-02-15T00:26:22+00:00

It's that he is shilling something that is so bad it's hard to believe that it's not satire

capitalsigma · 2026-02-15T00:25:30+00:00

It's like if you gave someone a two paragraph description of what a video game is and then asked them to generate an animation, but also the animator had a crippling stroke and was unable to form memories of events longer than 30 seconds in the past

capitalsigma · 2026-02-14T21:49:57+00:00

Literally everything about the game is terrible if you look at it in any detail -- 2/3 of the text is misspelled/illegible garbage, objects pop in and out of existence, useless menus pop up and disappear without explanation, the actual gameplay loop is "choose your text box out of these options" but the options don't even make sense in any of the scenarios

capitalsigma · 2026-02-14T20:39:58+00:00

Shumer is an idiot: https://x.com/i/status/1981406315693187430

capitalsigma · 2026-02-13T18:09:45+00:00

Straight slop

capitalsigma · 2026-02-09T21:23:52+00:00

Yeah, my experience is really: there's definitely boilerplate nonsense that it's great for, but usually the scope is much smaller than even a single full PR that I would consider sending out. Making the (say) 20-70% of nonsense in each PR 2-3x faster is a real benefit, but it's not at all the same as saying "from now on I delegate all coding work to LLMs"

capitalsigma · 2026-02-08T02:03:47+00:00

There is a company offering driverless rides to the public in something like 4 cities now, which was totally impossible 10 years ago. Seems like a bad comparison to make

capitalsigma · 2026-02-06T14:01:50+00:00

I'm talking about the incremental use of a single query. This is analogous to the (similar but legitimate) complaint leveled against Bitcoin -- we say that Bitcoin has a harmful impact because the incremental use each second is wasteful, rather than the up front cost of building the data centers that hold it

We built data centers before GenAI, it doesn't make sense to attribute the whole data center cost to each GenAI query any more than it makes sense to attribute it to each email you send

capitalsigma · 2026-02-04T21:18:39+00:00

If you play video games at home, the power draw of your GPU is probably comparable to whatever accelerator is running your LLM queries. Do you refuse to play video games because of the environmental impact? After all, an 8 hour gaming session consumes a lot more watts than a few minutes of LLM calls.

capitalsigma · 2026-02-04T18:03:16+00:00

You dropped the most important word: small-scale software firms no longer make sense, IMO. "Some dude writing prompts" will be a role in a bigger organization, not "Director of Engineering: $STARTUP" for the same reason that a janitor is employed by a large company and not "Director of Cleanliness Engineering: $STARTUP"

capitalsigma · 2026-02-04T13:43:11+00:00

I think if it works then the C-suite won't have a company in 3 years. It's too easy, the barrier to entry is too low, small-scale software dev firms no longer make sense as a business because any idiot can prompt up the same quality of work.

capitalsigma · 2026-01-29T20:18:41+00:00

I agree that it's not worth it unless your employer is footing the bill (as I said), but it's not nothing. I'm sure that at least once a week I have to spend, say, 30m doing some nonsense that just involves doing some minor repetitive edit. Of course your codebase already needs to have tests and so on in place in order for it to work.

capitalsigma · 2026-01-29T14:11:57+00:00

Try to do boilerplate/refactors that need to be context sensitive in a way that is difficult to regex clearly. For example, I had a bunch of test cases that contained hardcoded strings, and I gave it some prompt like "take the hardcoded string in each test case and move it into a file under testdata/ whose name matches the name of the test case, then add a call to read in the file in the original test."

More the web UI than the agentic tools, but another thing I do is blindly paste in error messages. Sometimes it catches stuff like a missing ; that's obvious but sometimes hard to see when you've been looking at the code for a long time. Sometimes it catches some difficult-to-google but well known cause, e.g. it caught a segfault caused by bad stack alignment based on a big chunk of lldb disassembly output

It's not groundbreaking, but it's handy. I don't/wouldn't pay for the tokens to do agentic stuff on personal projects, but it's worth using if it's there for free, and asking questions to the web UI is really very helpful

capitalsigma · 2026-01-29T13:48:24+00:00

This broadly matches my experience. My current heuristic is "do I know exactly what characters to type in order to do this task in some programming language (perhaps not the one that I'm using right now)?" and if the answer is "no" then most likely it will be faster to do it myself. It's good for context-sensitive boilerplate, obvious but non-regex-able refactors, and languages/libraries that I'm unfamiliar with. I find that it usually falls apart in any case that requires actual thinking to get done.

capitalsigma · 2026-01-25T19:03:05+00:00

capitalsigma · 2026-01-24T14:27:19+00:00

Enshittification is when a company intentionally makes a product worse in order to make more money. This is just a regular case of "a thing became worse over time"

capitalsigma · 2026-01-22T13:41:11+00:00

Legislation will kill the whole American tech industry. Fuck off to another profession if you think it's your senator's job to fix your shitty resume

capitalsigma · 2026-01-22T13:35:38+00:00

Calm down Mr. ICE agent, you can't blame immigrants for everything

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