Seriously, what value are tokens providing other than justifying layoffs. Concretely. Today. Not in the speculating scenario that cardiologist could be replaced with models.
We see this new trend of agentic coding, again a promise software will be written that way going forward, despite the number of fiasco already experienced when trusting a model turned bad. The use case may provide value, but right now all it does is fullfil the push for token consumption all these AI leaders are advocating for.
All that said the dotcom boom is extremely analogous and that crash was quite bad.
On the other end we have professionals happy to pay a subscription for heavier use, to build something in the hope to sell it.
I figured I don't believe in value when my dad explained to me his mate fired his team once he realised he could just pay 20 bucks for his Gemini account and run his business. I asked, do you call this value add? He said it must be, since he can produce the same output with no staff.
There is a confusion between profiting from a circumstance and value creation.
You create value if, say, you cure a disease. That it takes you an army of staff or extract maximum profit from it is just a feasibility formula.
That you make the cure more affordable is value creation.
That you cure the same disease but increase your profit doesn't create any value, except to yourself, for a while
Maybe you don't, but it's fairly obvious that a lot of things are changing and things are moving.
Maybe your dad's mate didn't have to expand on his business, good for him. Other business are expanding because they now can.
Will the positive overweigh the negative? Not necessarily, but to go "it's tulip" is the kind of argument so devoid of nuance that we shouldn't be discussing so on HN.
The overwhelming demand for token would not coming from people wanting a unique illustration - it would be from professional usage. In fact, I'm not even sure who is subsidized. The $20 subscription surely isn't being used fully across all members of that subscription.
2000's tech bubble was caused among other things over-investment to infrastructure and technology that had no users yet.
Totally different setup.
Does not mean AI boom will not turn to bust, but weak analogues generally don't help with understanding complex systems.
Claude helped me implement a ridiculous amount of features in my programming language. It's helped me migrate the heap to an easily moveable index-based object space. It's helped me implement generators. It's helped me implement a new memory allocator. It's helped me fix a ridiculous amounts of bugs and make a huge number of small improvements everywhere. Its ability to provide me repository wide code review was a game changer for a solo developer like me. And it's doing so much more than that. I got more things done in the past few weeks than previous months even though I'm evaluating, learning, understanding and rewriting the AI output.
It's actually addictive to build things with Claude. The usage limits are starting to make me anxious, just like withdrawal syndrome. I applied for their open source max subscription program even though I'm too small for it because who knows, I might get in anyway and it costs nothing.
AI is quite literally a world changing technology. I hope the open models keep steadily progressing and that hardware remains available to all so we can run our own models on our own computers one day.
Just far cheaper (if you are in USA) and probably more useful in terms of job prospects.
Agentic coding absolutely blew up from demand, users are not being tricked into paying $200 a month, and they’re not complaining about hitting rate limits because it’s useless.
users are not being tricked into paying $200 a month
This belief is so common amongst AI collapse people online. I'm guessing these people have only used free ChatGPT or worse, they use Windows and get Copilot shoved down their throats?
Meanwhile, I'm flying around with a $20 Codex subscription doing everything from writing code, analyzing stocks, coming up with ideas, etc.
IMO if someone tried this tech last time 6 months ago, or their only exposure is eg. via MS copilot, they do have a rational reason for skepticism. No technology of this complexity has improved this rapidly in my memory (well, ok, we had the CPU speed races from 90's to early 2000's).
From the 80486 to AMD Athlon64 X2 and much of that progress was enabled by better EDA being run on the more powerful CPUs being made with each improvement.
Now, we have better models helping to create even better models.
Let's say they have already plateau. But hardware continues to get better, right? So tokens should go down in price, not up. Since they're already 50%+ on inference today, better hardware would allow them to generate more tokens for less money.
I would pay $500 to start, build stuff with it, then keep going up the tiers as the stuff I'm building makes money.
It's adding tests for me and doing medium complexity refactors that I'd otherwise have to spend hours on
And based on reality (code) rather than my feelz of what I vaguely remember the code to have been doing in some long past.
there is an even larger force on HN that financially _needs_ the value of tokens to be inflated (so much so that bots have overwhelmed the site)
Like the OP said, it's incredible how polarizing this debate is. When I read comments like yours, I feel like a significant part of the global workforce in IT must be living on another planet? Or they never really used Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, ... intensively before because of company policies?
I legitimately am at least 10x more productive than a year ago, and I can prove it in number of commits and finished monetizable features developed per day. Obviously my workflows still very much require an active, constantly context-switching human-in-the-loop, but to me there's absolutely no question both output volume & quality have skyrocketed.
There are millions of other wanna be engineers doing exactly the same, assuming demand will scale as much as the offer.
What returns are you getting on those?
Let me create 500 websites, deployed for free, I hand that over to you by end of day. Will you give me a cent per piece? If so, happy to do business with you.
I would happily pay $200 a month for this. Luckily I dont need to, it's free.
Literally every game and website that I would have had to pay someone else to make I can now make myself. There's no value in that?
A year ago the best free LLM couldn't even give me a basic gridmap and collision. Now it can give me a full RCT style prototype & editor in 20 iterations.
I can only imagine what improvements we will have NEXT year!
Ponder that for a minute.
There are over 2 million games, for Android alone.
That you weren't making games before the advent of LLMs makes it cool for you to build, and at no cost. But people have been able to make games without them and already grew the market to saturation.
If the outcome of LLMs is that we get more games, it won't imply that people will consume more games. Most games never get played anyway.
Op never said they're selling games. They said they're making their own games and websites for a fraction of the cost (even $0). That's amazing value. And it's just getting better.
I didn't mean to patronize, sometimes self evidence isn't trivial to notice.
That claim is totally worthless without you providing concrete information how you measured that.
Value add so far lacks evidence.
Layoffs. It justifies them to the public. I'm not certain it grants them as it contradicts a principle of enterprise: scale, as much as you possibly can.
If tokens provided value today, we would be hiring more engineers to review their output and put things together.
That number is at least tenfold of what it was before, simply because I can run a lot of gruntwork in parallel now without wasting brainpower and focus on that stuff.
Coding, writing, summarizing, translating, data analysis, customer support, test generation.
Maybe we are closed to singularity, or maybe we'll just plateau somehow. But either case there are so much work to support the breakneck change that are not done because the change take priority every single time, there should be a lot of things to work on.
The question is how big the fail is if you measure it in 3 month increments going back to late 2022.
As long as there are more amount of success, then it should be net positive.
And unlike the traditional "this will replace humans right away", I think what this introduce is a lot of incentive to spread those token in places where there was never any incentive to hire a software engineer for previously. In turn, that will drive a lot of business activity in those area that will potentially fail given the current quality of the output.
This feels like a boom before bust scenario, and I'm not even sure if it will bust.