Technology

Who needs PRs? What's a branch? It defaults to master and that seems to work just fine!

They love money. AI was good money for a while. Or at least it looked like good money until you looked at it for longer than 3 seconds, which greatly surpasses the average attention span of an executive. And also the average executive's iq.

Mixed bag.

There are legitimately high value problems that AI works well against. But ungoverned proliferation has a net negative ROI across complex and difficult to measure areas.

When applied expertly, it works great. When blindly handed to your entire workforce as a panacea, not so much

They loved it too much and now it costs more than paying a living wage to a human being. The end goal of AI was always to cut cost and layoff people. The best sabotage right now is to setup a script that constantly prompts an LLM for something useless. I would recommend it if it didn't waste so much energy and clean water. But it would send a message. AI is not cheaper, it never was. Even with today's outrageous token prices, LLM companies are still bleeding money per user. It will only get more expensive as data center contracts fall through and the investment craze fizzles out.

But it stops clearly short of roflmao, I infer?

AI bubble popping is that gif of the crash test truck.

A very large chunk of the improvements in the last year have come not from categorically better models, but from the circumstances of the models massively improving. For example, reasoning is just automatic prompt engineering, and eats a fuckton of tokens. Harnesses give LLMs tools, making it easier to turn nondeterminism into determinism (does this code compile is a decision the compiler can answer definitely). Then there's subagents, which is just automatic context engineering.

Basically, the price per token might not have changed, but in practice, the amount of tokens used to get "SOTA" performance has massively increased.

"Tokens" are just made up.

These "tokens" that are used to "measure" how much you use, they are not a real dimension that can be measured. Just an artificial counter that goes up when they decide that it should go up.

They can change the "size" of a "token" every day, and every second, and every microsecond....

...said every day now for a year

Itd have to be some kind of bubble and that would mean we were in a lottttt of danger and should reasses our use of it.

Well yeah, but if it were the only sector propping up the whole economy and we reassessed it, the economy would be in a loooooot of danger anyway.

Luckily, that would never happen...

You mean those workflows that could've been traditional scripting and CI/CD, if not for management forcing AI into them? Those workflows?

If you run "agentic coding harness" or any kind of goal oriented loop then tokens goe brrrr.

And LLM sellers are pushing for that (duh), as they managed to convince people to use infinite monkeys typewriting until they make Hamled.

(Type made on purpose)

I do it on purpose

Agent loops for SWE burn a LOT of tokens.

I'm unfortunately temporarily disabled and can't use my hands for another 2 months. So I've leaned heavily into AI based workflows to keep my job in the meantime.

Aside from the nightmare of keeping quality high, not atrophying skills, and avoiding a lack of domain knowledge. It works reasonably okay.

Token usage is insane though. A productive day might cost a few hundred dollars in tokens all things considered. Quality is expensive as well, a good 1/4 of that are automated systems that exist to identify defects, quality, coherence....etc issues early.

Some companies had leaderboards and encouraged AI usage until they got their bills.

A big context costs a lot more