Your excellent comments make me grateful that I am retired and just work part time on my own research and learning. I believe you when you say professional developers will need large inference compute budgets.

Probably because I am an old man, but I don’t personally vibe with full time AI assistant use, rather I will use the best models available for brief periods on specific problems.

Ironically, when I do use the best models available to me it is almost always to work on making weaker and smaller models running on Ollama more effective for my interests.

BTW, I have used neural network tech in production since 1985, and I am thrilled by the rate of progress, but worry about such externalities as energy use, environmental factors, and hurting the job market for many young people.

I've been around for a while (not quite retirement age) and this time is the closest to the new feeling I had using the internet and web in the early days. There are simultaneously infinite possibilities but also great uncertainty what pathways will be taken and how things will end up.

There are a lot of parts in the near term to dislike here, especially the consequences for privacy, adtech, energy use. I do have concerns that the greatest pitfalls in the short terms are being ignored while other uncertainties are being exaggerated. (I've been warning on deep learning model use for recommendation engines for years, and only a sliver of people seem to have picked up on that one, for example.)

On the other hand, if good enough models can run locally, humans can end up with a lot more autonomy and choice with their software and operating systems than they have today. The most powerful models might run on supercomputers and just be solving the really big science problems. There is a lot of fantastic software out there that does not improve by throwing infinite resources at it.

Another consideration is while the big tech firms are spending (what will likely approach) hundreds of billions of dollars in a race to "AGI", what matters to those same companies even more than winning is making sure that the winner isn't a winner takes all. In that case, hopefully the outcome looks more like open source.

The SOTA models will always run in data centers, because they have 5x or more VRAM and 10-100x the compute allowance. Plus, they can make good use of scaling w/ batch inference which is a huge power savings, and which a single developer machine doesn’t make full use of.

> Pretty easy to hit $100 an hour

I don’t see how that can be true, but if it is…

Either you, or I are definitely use Claude Code incorrectly.

It’s definitely easy with an API key I hit 200$ in an evening. I didn’t think that could be possible. Horrifying

To be clear, this is a lot of full-scale reading and (re)writing, without any rules, promots, "agents"/code to limit your resource usage, right?

Nobody's asking for $200 in single-line diffs in less than a day - right?

Right, this is having Claude Code just running as an agent doing a lot of stuff. Also tool use is a big context hog here.

It’s not about a single line diff but the same prompts with cursor does not end costing that much

Yes - do you understand why?

Yes I do, it’s just for new comers who are used to cursor where, without careful prompting you just lock yourself out of premium requests, that’s not immediately a given that CC is more dangerous and does not work the same way at all. Of course it requires careful planning but the trap is easy to fall into.

In my experience, it's more about the tool's local indexing and aggressive automatic upload and model usage limitations to avoid them (and you) overpaying.

People are recreating this with local toolchains now.

This is around what what Cursor was costing me with Claude 4 Opus before I switched to Claude Code. Sonnet works fine for some things, but for some projects it spews unusable garbage, unless the specification is so detailed that it's almost the implementation already.

> unless the specification is so detailed that it's almost the implementation already.

You mean… it’s almost exactly like working with interns and jr developers? ;)

Yeah, it's like an idiot savant intern who has memorized all the API docs in the world, but still somehow struggles to work independently.

And never remembers what we talked about 5 minutes ago on a different thread.

This is where something like Perplexity's "memory" feature is really great. It treats other threads similarly to web resources.

I would love to understand better just how Perplexity is able to integrate up-to-date sources like other theads (and presumably recent web searches, but I haven't verified this, they could be just from the latest model) into it's query responses. It feels seamless.

Have you been human before? competition for resources and status is an instinctive trait.

It rears its head regardless of what sociopolitical environment you place us in.

You’re either competing to offer better products or services to customers…or you’re competing for your position in the breadline or politburo via black markets.

Even in the Soviet Union there were multiple design bureaus competing for designs of things like aircraft. Tupolec, Ilyushin, Sukhoi, Mikoyan-Gyurevich (MiG), Yakolev, Mil. There were quite a lot. Several (not all, they had their specialisations) provided designs when a requirement was raised. Not too different from the US yet not capitalist.

Unfortunately it's called war and it appears to be part of human nature.

Not really, it's possible with any market economy, even a hypothetical socialist one (that is, one where all market actors are worker-owned co-ops).

And, since there is no global super-state, the world economy is a market economy, so even if every state were a state-owned planned economy, North Korea style, still there would exist this type of competition between states.

Worker owned coops are not socialist unless the government forces it.

That is true, but if all business are worker owned Co-ops then it has to be forced

They are not worker owned, they have some small amount of worker ownership. But the majority of stock is never owned by workers, other than the CEO.

Consider also that VC funds often have pension funds as their limited partners. Workers have a claim to their pension, and thus a claim to the startup returns that the VC invests in.

So yeah it basically comes down to your definition of "worker-owned". What fraction of worker ownership is necessary? Do C-level execs count as workers? Can it be "worker-owned" if the "workers" are people working elsewhere?

Beyond the "worker-owned" terminology, why is this distinction supposed to matter exactly? Supposing there was an SV startup that was relatively generous with equity compensation, so over 50% of equity is owned by non-C-level employees. What would you expect to change, if anything, if that threshold was passed?

> Supposing there was an SV startup that was relatively generous with equity compensation, so over 50% of equity is owned by non-C-level employees. What would you expect to change, if anything, if that threshold was passed?

If the workers are majority owners, then they can, for example, fire a CEO that is leading the company in the wrong direction, or trying to cut their salaries, or anything like that.

>If the workers are majority owners, then they can, for example, fire a CEO that is leading the company in the wrong direction, or trying to cut their salaries, or anything like that.

Why wouldn't the board fire said CEO?

The most common reason to cut salaries is if the company is in dire financial straits regardless. Co-ops are more likely to cut salary and less likely to do layoffs.

Because the board doesn't understand the business at the level that employees do. Or because the board has different goals for the business than employees do. Or because the board is filled with friends of the CEO who let them do whatever.

Also, lots of companies reduce salaries or headcount if they feel they can get away with it. They don't need to be in dire financial straights, it's enough to have a few quarters of no or low growth and to want to show a positive change.

It’s not “your definition”. Worker owned means the workers own the means of production. What you’re talking about is not that at all.

What changes is democracy in the work place.

You are confusing owning minority equity with what actual control gives you —- actual ownership of capital/MoP/assets/profits

How specifically would you expect a typical SV corp's policies to change if employee equity passes from 49% to 51%?

Remember, if employees own 49%, if they can persuade just 2% of the other shareholders that a change will be positive for the business, they can make that change. So minority vs majority is not as significant as it may seem.