QuadrupleA

Well, they just lost me forever as a VPN customer.

Been a reasonably happy DuckDuckGo user for years. It has the SEO slop problems too, and they jumped the AI shark like everybody else, but you can turn the AI off at least and still have your search engine and chatbot be separate tools.

Google let the web descend into SEO slop long ago despite that they could have EASILY spotted and purged low quality over-verbose results and the sites that pooped them out. They make businesses pay to have the top sponsored result, when they're already the top organic result, but the ads are indistinguishable from real results now. They made the web worse for everyone to line their own pockets. Screw them.

IE was such a scourge, a drain on humanity (at least the slice of humanity that made websites). One of Microsoft's great evils - they let the product stagnate for years once they had the market cornered.

Windows has kinda become that now, a low quality user-hostile product forced on people through inertia and monopoly tactics.

Love this quote, seems to apply to all software these days and maybe business generally: "They're trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job."

Ted Chiang made a similar point in his article "ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web" a few years ago:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-...

Point not mentioned: it just doesn't work that well! It lies, it reverts to the mean on every topic, it wastes the reader's time. It's toxically positive, sycophantic. It's such a good mimic that it's insidiously hard to distinguish its bullshit or fake work from real work.

Always amazed how spoiled we are with modern hardware! The 8087 was $500 in today's dollars, and delivered around 50 kFLOPS of performance (0.00005 GFLOPS).

A cheap mobile phone CPU+GPU costs the manufacturer maybe $20, and typically does 50 GFLOPS on the CPU and 500+ on the GPU. So 10 million times the performance for 1/25th the cost.

Humbling too how "worthless" all the incredible ingenuity of the 8087 circuits and die designs now is, although I'm sure many of those innovations live on in modern chips.

This hype cycle is unique in that the tech writes its own hype.

The effort required to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude more than to create it.

Because AI creates unmaintainable messes in any language, and ergonomic ones help humans clean up.

Not sure how excited I feel about visiting your website and having it auto-download a 8GB model with GPT-3.5 level hallucinations, and then probably crash because I only have 6GB of VRAM. My dad won't be able to use it, or anyone else without a bleeding edge device. On a powerful enough "neural engine" device the battery will be drained quickly, while the heatsink burns a hole in my lap.

This is just emotional rhetoric. Pretty much any app in the last 20 years has depended on a server somewhere, or a cloud provider. Like an AI provider, they can go down, they can turn off if you don't pay your bill, etc.

And local inference requires fairly beefy hardware, that is FAR from ubiquitous across today's userbases. Local models are also still far dumber than what frontier labs can serve.

Weird that this is getting such a tidal wave of upvotes.

Exactly double the cost of GPT 5.4 - $5 per MTok input, $0.50 cached, $30 output.

All the AI players definitely seem to be trying to claw more money out of their users at the moment.

Definitely seems like AI money got tight the last month or two - that the free beer is running out and enshittification has begun.

One thing I don't see often mentioned - OpenAI API's auto token caching approach results in MASSIVE cost savings on agent stuff. Anthropic's deliberate caching is a pain in comparison. Wish they'd just keep the KV cache hot for 60 seconds or so, so we don't have to pay the input costs over and over again, for every growing conversation turn.

Love SQLite and most of these features.

On the STRICT mode, I've asked this elsewhere and never gotten an answer: does anyone have a loose-typing example application where SQLite's non-strict, different-type-allowed-for-each-row has been a big benefit? I love the simplicity of SQLite's small number of column types, but the any-type-allowed-anywhere design always seemed a little strange.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned much, in AI coding and other AI-assisted work, is the sheer needless verbosity of models, the walls of text they spew out for us to read through. This alone adds to the workload & fatigue.

There's a thing in writing, "pity the reader" - respect your audience's time, get to the point. In The Elements of Style, "omit needless words."

You can prompt models to be succinct, but the latest ones - GPT 5-series especially - ignore your requests and spew paragraphs upon paragraphs of noise. Maybe it's the incentives of charging per token?

If you want, I can expand on this topic and generate a lengthy comparison chart.

Fun fact: Copilot gives you no way to ignore sensitive files with API keys, passwords, DB credentials, etc.: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/11254#discussi...

So by default you send all this to Microsoft by opening your IDE.

> everybody who is like me, fully onboarded into AI and agentic tools, seemingly has less and less time available because we fall into a trap where we’re immediately filling it with more things

I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone up, or if it just gives the illusion of that, and we take on more projects and burn ourselves out?

As a 20+ year Windows user now happily running desktop Linux for about a year - too little, too late. This company has completely lost my trust over the past 5+ years, with all the ads, upsells, silent telemetry, bugs, background process mess, forced updates, poor performance, etc.

It's not only steered me off of Windows, but Azure, Office, and anything else with the Microsoft name on it. I'll do my best to steer family and business customers off likewise.

Trust is earned over years, and whoever the execs are that pushed all these shitty short-term squeezes on their customers, the company now gets to pay the reputational price.

Average dev might be more intelligent, but likely neither will produce something of UV's quality. Either AI coding claims are way overblown and OpenAI can't easily remake UV, or OpenAI is buying the ecosystem & mindshare rather the code, probably to lock-in, enshittify, and try to squeeze a profit out of a so far money-losing business (AI not Astral, though true for both I guess).

Not sure I follow - is the car the coding agent, and the developer the driver?

Agree with OP here, if AI coding tools are as intelligent and amazing as AI influencers and CEOs are saying, just prompt them to "Remake UV but faster & better".

Side note, everyone's talking about having AI agents "conform to the spec" these days. Am I in my own bubble, or - who the hell these days gets The Spec as a well-formed document? Let alone a good document, something that can be formally verified, thouroughly test-cased, can christen the software "complete" when all its boxes are ticked, etc.?

This seems like 1980's corporate waterfall thinking, doesn't jibe with the messy reality I've seen with customers, unclear ideas, changing market and technical environments, the need for iteration and experimentation, mid-course correction, etc.

No slowdown that I've seen - my style of freelancing is pretty long-term though, clients I've known and worked with for many years.

As a veteran freelance developer - aside from some occasional big wins, I'd say it's been net neutral or even net negative to my productivity. When I review AI-generated code carefully (and if I'm delivering it to clients I feel that's my responsibility) I always find unnecessary complexity, conceptual errors, performance issues, looming maintainability problems, etc. If I were to let it run free, these would just compound.

A couple "win" examples: add in-text links to every term in this paragraph that appears elsewhere on the page, plus corresponding anchors in the relevant page parts. Or, replace any static text on this page with any corresponding dynamic elements from this reference URL.

Lose examples: constant, but edit format glitches (not matching searched text; even the venerable Opus 4.6 constantly screws this up), unnecessary intermediate variables, ridiculously over-cautious exception-handling, failing to see opportunities to isolate repeated code into a function, or to utilize an existing function that exactly implements said N lines of code, etc.

Claude Code's primarily optimized for burning as many tokens as possible.

Holy crap. What a dystopia. Guess some of this blood money went into free Llama models and the react.js ecosystem (dubious gift to the world).

Is it possible to make money these days without being ethically bankrupt?

The amount of boilerplate people talk about seems like the fault of these big modern frameworks honestly. A good system design shouldn't HAVE so much boilerplate. Think people would be better off simplifying and eliminating it deterministically before reaching for the LLM slot machine.

Glib observation, but this sounds quite generic and AI-written.