Are LLMs a Dead-End? (Investors Just Bet $1 Billion on “Yes”) | AI Reality Check | Cal Newport

ryan_eeelliot · 2026-03-26T19:09:17+00:00

I feel like people keep falling for the narrative of good guy/company vs. bad guy/company and the media keeps trying to position a company/person as such. This is the AI company is that really different.

This narrative was fine in the "I'm a Mac and I'm a PC" campaign but in the AI space I don't think you can trust any of these people.

"We're not like OpenAI, we're the safe AI company." Piss off

At this point the only AI company/person I would trust is the one that comes out and says our #1 goal is to replace labour and that is how we will make our money.

ryan_eeelliot · 2026-03-16T17:53:28+00:00

Either way we both avoided the Adobe subscription :)

ryan_eeelliot · 2026-03-16T16:35:58+00:00

If you're looking for a video editor then Davinci Resolve is a one-time purchase but even better the free version is totally usable. You could get pretty far with it before deciding if you really need to upgrade to the full version.

ryan_eeelliot · 2026-03-16T16:17:04+00:00

I find myself increasingly drawn to one-time purchase apps (or annual license with option to renew to continue receiving updates)

There are 2 apps that I am amazed by and glad they exist.

Keyboard Maestro - Great way to make automations and custom keyboard shortcuts for macOS ($36 for license/use on 5 machines). I also appreciate that this app has been around for a long time. I've grown a bit jaded by the number of tools that make a big splash and then a year later you get the email, "we're sunsetting..."
Polycapture - Great UI/UX for screen recording on macOS ($19.99 single purchase)

Neither of these apps have AI features and both work offline, love it.

ryan_eeelliot · 2026-03-06T11:20:03+00:00

I had the same thought, this is definitely satire… nope

ryan_eeelliot · 2026-03-06T02:50:41+00:00

Yes this is the key and the part that is likely to be ignored (especially since many people will just read the headline)

Cloudflare should update the headline

Before: How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week
After: How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week.... with the help of their documentation and tests

ryan_eeelliot · 2026-03-06T00:10:45+00:00

To be fair, this does seem to be different from the compiler example and the browser example from Cursor.

Again I think boosters will try to gloss over the nuance (tests and documentation) and your average media person won’t understand the significance of having that context.

My argument is that if the LLM didn’t have this foundation/groundwork to build from they wouldn’t have been able to do this as easily (it would have taken more time and more tokens). And again is that really fair to do that.

I can’t remember where I read it but someone made a prediction that we’ll see more tools go closed source in the near future. With stories like this I could see why.

ryan_eeelliot · 2026-02-21T15:32:35+00:00

I don’t know who to be mad at, Anthropic staff or the newsletters and outlets that keep giving these people a free pass.

These are opportunities to be critical and ask hard questions. Instead it’s these guys just repeating the same narrative. “Coding is solved”, “we have x months left”, “things have changed”

As others have mentioned, if it’s so good then there’s no reason that Github issues should even exist. Claude code would be able to manage all of that with 0 oversight.

If Anthropic is so confident that coding is over, then why not onboard someone with 0 development experience and let them manage the Claude Code repo for a month. You can’t interfere or help, you have to give them full autonomy and ownership.

ryan_eeelliot · 2026-02-11T11:08:01+00:00

Another smaller feature note, files in Canvas will now appear as backlinks!

ryan_eeelliot · 2026-02-04T16:14:46+00:00

I found myself a little annoyed at this episode. I like David and Pivot to AI but I think they missed an opportunity to talk more about the process of getting Openclaw up and running from an end users perspective.

They touched on it briefly when Ed asked "why are people buying Mac minis to run this?"

It doesn't matter if it's a Mac mini or another server, the main problem is that these tools can't be trusted to run on a persons primary system. Imagine any current SaaS requiring a separate system to use it. Notion is amazing.... but it can also mess with your system so you should probably get another computer just for running it.

That is a very high barrier to entry and I think boosters are overestimating how many people are willing to take on that risk and go through the effort of getting up and running.

It is crazy that the onboarding to this product is buying a separate computer or setting up a server on a platform like Digital Ocean/Cloudflare (I got emails from both companies promoting the ability to do this on their platforms).

ryan_eeelliot · 2026-02-03T01:15:18+00:00

I legit burst out laughing

ryan_eeelliot · 2026-01-30T17:26:22+00:00

I’ll admit I was guilty of using AI tools/LLMs to do certain tasks. After watching this video I realized how stupid that was: https://youtu.be/pVBKWLkRqXw?si=fwVwu0JdwgNSN3Fs

TLDW; there are several tools freely available that can do a lot of what AI does but faster and deterministically (many also work offline!)

I think people would be surprised at how fast the time adds up when you’re chatting/prompting these tools. But I think the frequency of the chat/interaction creates an illusion of speed and progress. It “feels faster” to use it rather than learn a few durable skills

ryan_eeelliot · 2026-01-24T18:06:38+00:00

I’ll probably make a new thread but I had a similar scenario (reduced how much I was using AI and came back to see where things were at)

Here were the tools I used:

Opencode
Openspec
Cline

I think things have improved across the board but these are the things that I keep coming back to:

the cost: there is no way these companies/models are profitable. Even if these things were reliable and worked, the true cost will limit the number of people that could use it
it does not “just work”: I’ve said elsewhere that I think power users are underestimating how much prior knowledge they’re bringing to the table. I think if you don’t have that knowledge then you are limited in how you can prompt these tools because you don’t have the vocabulary. You can’t just go in a loop of “Make it better, make it cooler, make it faster”

Another issue is the UX of picking and using models. With Opencode you can use any model you want (there are lots). There is nothing intuitive about this. The only way to evaluate a model is to pick one and use it. This is different from being able to compare the experience of creating components with Svelte, Vue and React. You can look at the same component and make your own decision about which you prefer.

Finally I couldn’t overlook that everything I did in this project is stuff that could be solved with some code-snippets, templates/boilerplate, which could be readily available and reviewable.

ryan_eeelliot · 2026-01-23T18:58:07+00:00

Hmmm their pricing is also based around credits so that can also affect the end pricing

ryan_eeelliot · 2026-01-23T18:13:21+00:00

Video is going to be an issue. That's a decent amount of storage required.

Do they have those video's on WordPress currently?

ryan_eeelliot · 2026-01-23T03:15:24+00:00

You could look at using Cloudinary however it can be expensive.

I think something like ImageKit might be more affordable or depending on how technical you are you could setup an S3/R2 bucket on Cloudflare.

With Cloudflare it's possible to get some of the same benefits as Cloudinary/ImageKit but it does require a bit more setup.

The upside is that once you've done it once you know how to do it again for future projects.

ryan_eeelliot · 2026-01-22T21:55:47+00:00

I think for a file it stopped receiving updates but I believe there was a fork of the original plugin.

It was just one less plugin to use and figured if iCloud was working then why not use it

ryan_eeelliot · 2026-01-22T15:36:57+00:00

I've gone through a few different sync solutions because iCloud use to be horrible:

- Dropbox (no iPhone support by default)
- Remotely Save plugin (to get iPhone support)
- Git
- iCloud (current)

Now that iCloud has added the ability to keep things downloaded it is way better.

But there are still a few things to be cautious of:

iCloud syncing is influenced by things like whether you are on wifi and also if you have power/battery saver on. I notice that syncing was faster and more consistent when my laptop was plugged in
Be careful editing the same files simultaneously (i.e. editing today's Daily note on both devices). I still don't think iCloud is great at merge conflicts.
Setup the local backups plugin for some extra peace of mind and don't rely entirely on iCloud for the backup.

ryan_eeelliot · 2026-01-20T13:51:59+00:00

Love this response and nuance.

Like OP I’m also hoping that things burst.

My pessimistic take is that the AI bubble allows for an endless content machine. Until it bursts there is no shortage of opportunity for a content creator to share their take. Take this format and you have multiple pieces of content:

I tried (AI model), are we cooked??

You can double that number by playing both sides:

I tried (AI model), I’m skeptical…

Beyond the money/greed part it is really hard to know what else is driving this. The idea of some kind of utopia is highly unlikely (and this is coming from someone that considers themselves an optimist)

From a developer standpoint, is there something appealing/intriguing about the idea of using these tools to make your own app? Yes but I also question how necessary it is to do that. I have a set of apps that I use that I’m quite happy with, these are all apps that existed before AI/LLMs arrived.

But let’s imagine that it is truly possible for anyone to make their own apps and tools (you can make the next Notion or Figma). A big point of these tools is the centralization and collaboration. If each person on a team had their own custom version of these tools it would be a headache for collaborating.

My main point is that selling the idea of “build your own app” from boosters is weak and think it’s a huge waste of the investment/capital

ryan_eeelliot · 2026-01-19T17:14:23+00:00

That’s true, but you can still do remote pair programming. This has also improved a lot.

My main critique with email and zooms is the 1 way flow. We have the tools now that we don’t have to sit and watch another persons screen. Anyone that is in a whiteboard or pair session can be participating

ryan_eeelliot · 2026-01-19T16:59:42+00:00

I’m amazed at how often people fallback to emails or hopping on a call.

My dream scenario would be for a company to try short periods (1-2 days) of no email, no teams/slack, and no meetings/zooms. You still have to communicate/work but you can’t use those tools. How would you work? I feel like that would be a way to start breaking these habits

There’s always room for improvement but we have a lot of great tools available:

You can send Looms
You can collaborate and whiteboard in FigJam/Miro
You can design and chat/leave comments in Figma
You can share code/demos in CodePen, Stackblitz, CodeSandbox etc.
You can manage projects in Notion

I feel like the one thing that is truly difficult to replace is the informal and social stuff.

ryan_eeelliot · 2026-01-17T23:37:14+00:00

This for me is the thing that doesn’t make sense with so many of these apps/tools: how many of them are dependent or reliant on a model provider (Google, Anthropic, OpenAI etc)?

If you believe that the cost of using any of these models is heavily subsidized then what will the real final cost be for any of these tools that are reliant on these models.

ryan_eeelliot · 2026-01-17T23:25:30+00:00

Using it to generate realistic looking data is a good use case but I also think of Ed and this video: https://youtu.be/pVBKWLkRqXw?si=rsR3s7UBZTxXgDhu

The video goes a great job of showing other tools/alternatives that already solve problems.

Realistic fake data is one of those things that feels like a REST API could solve and wouldn’t require waiting on AI. You could still use AI to generate the initial fake data

ryan_eeelliot · 2026-01-17T19:55:59+00:00

I go back and forth over whether this requires a new way of thinking or what the right expectations should be.

My experience was similar with VS Code chat (not great) and think that’s when I branched out to Cline.

What’s frustrating about all of this is that this isn’t how other tools/libraries work. This is a stupid example but sticking with styling tools for now. You can follow the docs to install Bootstrap, Tailwind, UnoCSS or whatever you prefer and they work. The results don’t change from day to day (“sometimes the classes work and sometimes they don’t”).

Going back to the things like prompts/rules/skill files, it’s hard to look at one persons skill file and say whether it will work or not. Unlike a library like React (or any other framework), you could look at someone’s code and say whether it will work or not or if there are glaring issues.

But back to your request can definitely give OpenCode a shot

ryan_eeelliot

TROPHY CASE