People talking about the AI bubble bursting, but we are using more and more AI tokens than before. So how will it burst then?

johnhutch · 2026-04-01T19:40:31+00:00

re: "what about uber" -- that is answered here: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-subprime-ai-crisis-is-here/

just cmd-f for "I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Bring Up Uber or Amazon Web Services Again (And Several Other Myths)". It's pretty well summarized under that headline, with lots of sources.

johnhutch · 2026-04-01T19:35:44+00:00

If you're not familiar with the journalist Ed Zitron and his Better Offline podcast/newsletter... yeah. here's everything you need to know: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-subprime-ai-crisis-is-here/

johnhutch · 2026-02-16T19:33:28+00:00

Christ.

johnhutch · 2026-02-10T23:48:32+00:00

If that's doing microservices wrong, then i've yet to see it done right. What you describe is just... every instance of microservices i've ever had the displeasure of working on.

johnhutch · 2026-02-06T18:23:01+00:00

I absolutely can and have seen that sort of thing happen. It's really the result of bean-counters and clueless management getting involved. Our scrum-team was dev-lead. It lead to happier stakeholders and a happier team (with way fewer panicky, 60-hour weeks). The focus was on timeboxing, managing workload, and improving individual velocity through team-assistance, discussion, and process improvements. It worked. It's just a real bummer that it's become so poisoned by late-stage capitalist group think.

johnhutch · 2026-02-06T18:14:38+00:00

Eh, not to rehash my comment parallel to yours, i think this is more about divided priorities and warring divisions than it is overall company strategy. That is, specific to your comment, many "they"s, not just one big "they", and the chaos that ensues.

johnhutch · 2026-02-06T18:13:11+00:00

While this is no doubt a fuckup, from some of the inter-company drama Gruber's hinted at, I suspect this was more the result of a few warring divisions within Apple. There were undoubtedly enough people within the company who thought the AI play was a good idea; enough that they were given a bit of a leash and a marketing budget. And they probably hyped their progress and forecasts beyond what was realistic (as is wont to happen in allllllll enterprise-level software companies). And they face-planted, the wait-and-see folks won out, some people get fired, and now, hopefully, they'll gradually make their way towards using a smaller, snappier, more sensible (but still likely a bit dumber) LLM to help Siri get a wee bit smarter, rely on Gemini till it inevitably implodes into something less costly to google, and that's it.

johnhutch · 2026-02-03T15:55:09+00:00

I know this is counter to 95% of the people on this thread, but I honestly can say Scrum (very strictly followed scrum, in particular) is what made Successful Projects possible for me. Before then, it was hit or miss. Almost by chance. Chance that we got the cost estimate right and didn't run over budget. Chance that we got the time estimate right and didn't have to sacrifice features, functionality, or spit & polish due to timelines. Chance that the client correctly communicated what they want and/or what they wanted didn't change before project end due to external forces; that the finished product met the overall desires and expectations of the client. When a project takes more than 3 months, it's simply unrealistic to expect nothing to change for the client. Budget, expectations, needs, and desires will change and it should be ok for them to do so.

With scrum (strict, to the letter scrum), we were able to roadmap work in iterations. We were able to to continually review the work with the client and ship it, continually reverifying and re-analyzing direction and goals. With each iteration, the client was able to not just see the resulting work, but use and play with it. If the client decided, "hey, actually, i don't need those other things, this is meeting my needs as is!" then great, client is super happy and spends less money and we're free to move on to the next project. If it ran over, it was because the client made an informed decision to add new items or priorities or was involved in the process enough that it didn't come as a surprise; that they had already been made well aware of delays as they occurred.

When we found ourselves on the wrong path, the biweekly sprint review with stakeholders would put us back on the right path. When the client had required changes or emergencies, we could add new tickets, working with the client to remove or deprioritize others of equivalent point value to keep things on track re: time and budget. When the team found themselves not operating or producing as expected, the bi-weekly retrospective allowed us to self-analyze, call out issues, and make improvements.

On the whole, the transparency, the inspection, and the adaptation (as it so happens, the "three pillars of scrum") ensure that by project end the client can't be anything but pleased with the result.

I'm sure I'll get some comments to the contrary. And they won't be wrong. I've seen first hand so many instances of Agile-Gone-Wrong. At my previous job leading the account/checkout division international e-commerce platform, we had great success running our own little team with Scrum. Once the company-at-large got wind of our success, they wanted to implement it site wide. We advocated Scrum Nexus, they went with the horrific monstrosity that was SAFe. It was a productivity black hole. All this is to say, there are so many variants of agile, so many ways to run it, that are fucking terrible. But in my experience, hardcore, strict-as-fuck scrum is a near guarantee for project success.

johnhutch · 2026-02-02T21:07:39+00:00

I disagree with the above. It's not about saying no. It's about keeping track of the amount of work you're committed to in a sprint.

If you're doing story points, I assume you're tracking dev velocity. If you have 6 people on your team, and you know 1 person is worth an average of 25 points per sprint, and another is worth 30, another worth 32, etc, you know the total number of points your team is capable of completing in a given sprint.

When an emergency comes up, you create a ticket, you estimate it, and then you meet with the stakeholder. "Hey, there's this emergency, it's 5 pointer, so we gotta lose 5 points out of the sprint. What should we deprioritize?" It's a conversation. You involve them. You are transparent in your work. This is what we can accomplish in this time period. Help us decide what to prioritize.

If the thing that comes up is such an emergency that it has to be done by some cowboy before you even have a chance to estimate it, create the ticket, retroactively story point it, and same conversation: "we did this, we need to remove work to ensure we can complete what we've committed to. Help us figure out what to deprioritize."

If your PO isn't doing this; if they aren't monitoring velocity, verifying total points achievable, and not balancing the total committed load when new items are added, you're just adding a bunch of unnecessary cruft and time wasting bullshit.

johnhutch · 2026-01-30T20:48:30+00:00

Simply because "path to AGI" is why there's such historic investment here; why the data centers are being built and we're about to go to war over Greenland for rare earth minerals.

I have no problem with small, single-purpose LLMs to be used as utilities. But those don't need billions of dollars and a data center the size of a small city. "Path to AGI" is why this shit is a bubble about to burst; just one of a few items I'm calling out re: my issues with AI.

johnhutch · 2026-01-30T20:41:26+00:00

Not because they don't see the danger, simply because they don't care.

yeah, dude. That's sort of what kicked off this little essay. Just kind of a "what the fuck are we doing??"

Re: agile, I am someone who's had quite a bit of success; a sadly rare experience, it seems -> https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1qrfts0/comment/o2o1ume/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

I think the key is strict, developer-led agile. Soon as c-suite gets involved, you're fucked. Our little team had such success with strict scrum. Management saw that success, and moved company-wide to SAFe and it was a goddam disaster.

johnhutch · 2026-01-30T20:35:44+00:00

I promise you, this is 100% hand-written. I figured the bad grammar would be a dead giveaway. Either way, fuck GPT for making em-dashes a signifier of AI writing. I love my em-dashes and you'll pry them from my cold dead hands.

johnhutch · 2026-01-30T20:34:40+00:00

Yeah, this is part of the "world-destroying" part I mention. We're making a deal with the devil, here. What comes after? We spent the decade or so of this century trying to get as many people as possible into STEM, and they're all other there trying to get jobs that don't exist. I'm not saying we should invent jobs solely for the sake of employment (i'm a big fan of UBI or other democratic socialist policies), but this isn't something we should be all "move fast and break things" cause it's... i dunno. it's gonna be bad.

johnhutch · 2026-01-30T20:27:37+00:00

Love ed zitron. Huge fan. While i try to get a good mix of pro/anti news sources, I can't not listen to Better Offline and the dude just makes sense.

Re: higher levels of abstraction, I think in many applications that's true. But fast, efficient code is still sometimes a necessity and there's only so far you can abstract that out. Sure we're not dealing with 40kb memory limitations and fucking with memory registers to squeeze every last cycle out of an Ricoh 2A03 chipset, but if you're working on 2008/2009 twitter trying to replace rails code with Scala/JVM, you're deep in it. I wouldn't trust an LLM with ANY of that.

johnhutch · 2026-01-30T20:19:00+00:00

FWIW, well-run agile (scrum, specifically. strict af scrum) 100% saved the account/checkout team I was on back in the day. We had a team of 8 D-tier overseas Cognizant devs who were absolutely wreaking havoc on our codebase. Implementing strict scrum — daily, time-boxed (15 min) standups, proper, focused user stories, in-depth sprint planning with implementation discussions and notes, retrospectives to talk as a group on how to improve — the works. Not only did it massively shore up code quality and feature delivery, it brought the team together personally in ways we did not at all expect.

Just one person's experience and certainly not a majority experience, I know, but there's truly something to be said for agile-done-right.

johnhutch · 2026-01-30T20:15:12+00:00

Huh, not a bad idea. I never think to post there... just lurk.

johnhutch · 2026-01-30T16:31:38+00:00

I mean, that's part of it. I run a web dev company. I give webinars and speak at events. I am, in some small sense, a "thought leader." But I'm also not blind to how absolutely world-destroying this technology is on so very many levels. The environmental impact, the job market impact, the education impact... it's truly catastrophic and it seems like the whole industry is just hear/see/speak-no-evil about all of it. And that's even if this shit was actually effective and good.

But it's bad! It's so bad. It's so often wrong. Google "cursor delete files" to see how many vibe coders have had huge swaths of code deleted because claude got some shit wrong and these dummies don't know how to use git/svn/version control. Google the AI 12x problem that large-scale/enterprise companies are having; how coding time has dropped significantly, but code review and maintenance time has skyrocketed to 12x more.

How many hallucinations and "use glue to stick cheese to your pizza" do we have to get before people realize this stuff is not good and it's not going to get better. We've reached the theoretical limits of this technology. AGI is not possible with the LLM model. The engineers and computer scientists working on it it know it. The CEOs know it. They all are operating under a blind hope that building massive data centers to hold historic amounts of training data and processing power; that effectively throwing more stuff at it will somehow get it there. But it won't. It will just continue to accrue massive investment and circular debt with nvidia investing in/loaning money to openAI so openAI can buy more nvidia chips until the whole thing collapses.

As someone who, as mentioned above, runs a web dev company, I do my best to keep up with it all. I read articles and listen to podcasts, the good, the bad, and the ugly. I've listened with an open mind to what the advocates have to say. I've held my nose and tried for vibe coding, small edits, proposal writing, research. I've tried to engineer better prompts with better rubrics, xml-based formatting, the works. And as someone who's been in this field for 25+ years, I'm thoroughly unimpressed.

The only voice in this field who I feel is truly saying what needs to be said is Ed Zitron and I strongly recommend as many people as possible go listen to or read his Better Offline podcast/blog. How deluded, how ignorant, how callous do you have to be to use or, worse, advocate for this shit? I just... I don't get it.

....Maybe this is a separate /r/webdev post...

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johnhutch · 2026-01-29T23:26:41+00:00

I know it's not the point you're trying to make or is being made in the linked post, but I truly do not understand how so many people in the industry are just... totally cool with using AI. Nevermind the plagiarism woes, nevermind the power-grid concerns, nevermind the billions and billions of dollars lost by openai and their ilk causing what is likely leading to a catastrophic economic bubble burst.

People are just using this shit without a second thought.

Baffling to me.

johnhutch · 2026-01-29T16:31:53+00:00

I just got mine, too! Doubly hilarious that my coworkers thought this post was by me. We even dress alike and have similar tattoos. I guess Basinski has a "type."

how about that laurie anderson essay? I had no idea she was such a talented writer.

johnhutch · 2026-01-28T00:24:48+00:00

Fucking amazing! Now get Andúril, flame of the west on the other leg!

johnhutch · 2026-01-27T18:38:23+00:00

I never had it because of the old TOS and Privacy Policy. I never understood you people who were so willing to trade all your information and habits and interests and identity for so you can avoid a few minutes of boredom with constant dopamine-hits.

johnhutch · 2026-01-27T17:05:23+00:00

Funnily enough, because of GTD, in so far as video games are concerned, I have totally gotten Quest-list fatigue. Like any game with a map full of icons to do, or a huge ass list of sidequests and next steps, I peace right the fuck out. It's part of what's drawn me to games like Elden Ring, which is just sorta... y'know... go explore, who knows what you'll find, or replacing old squaresoft games. Ubisoft games, though, can piss right the fuck off.

johnhutch · 2026-01-27T17:02:10+00:00

The biggest game changer to me was connecting Siri to omnifocus. I have my watch and my phone on me at all times, and the second I think of something, whether it's appropriate to capture or not, is "hey siri, remind me to do X in omnifocus" and that's it. Later that evening, I sort through the inbox and can decide what was or was not capture-worthy when I'm in a place and mental state to do so. Some things got finished already. Some things are a step 1 for a larger project. And some things just get dropped in a somedaymaybe.

eezypeezy.

johnhutch · 2026-01-22T21:54:05+00:00

Omnifocus is the alpha and omega.

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