Hacker News Reader

Comment by macmac_mac | Hacker News Reader

FWIW I’ve been in enough of these cycles to see the same pattern play out now with software + AI hype that I saw back in crypto land. You get:

some half-baked project that looks cool until you actually try it,

a flood of “look at me I’m first” blog posts and influencers hyping the hell out of it,

people and companies saying they’re building on it because they don’t want to be left behind,

a weird intersection with tokens/coins thrown in as an afterthought because hey, incentives, right? — and suddenly the narrative becomes “pump this thing hard”.

View on HN

I mean besides crypto and ai being big investments, i barely see any parallels. AI you can actually use to build useful things in the world , and tokens are used not as trading , but transactional currency to do that building.

I did a lot of postgraduate research around crypto from 2011 - 2016. There are a lot of parallels, and your message adds to them.

"x is different because we can actually do useful stuff with it" is what every x enthusiast deep in an x bubble or pump n dump says about x.

When the next big tech bubble comes along in 10 - 15 years, there will be people saying exactly what you just said: "NextBigTech you can actually use to build useful things in the world, and NextBigTech thing actually does that building, not just what LastBigTech thing (AI) did, that obviously didn't deliver the utopia it promised".

I wonder what it'll be. AGI? Quantum computing? Brain computer interfaces?

I'd love to pickup this conversation again with you in 15 years.

Exactly this. Before crypto it was Big Data, before that it was Low-code platforms

Was low code platforms ever hyped to a tiny fraction of crypto and ai?

They were when we called them 4GLs.

You mean things like Ruby, Python, Java, SQL that are ubiquitous today?

Yeah but the hype was that the user would become the programmer and programmers wouldn’t be needed anymore.

Well theres a lot less assembly workers, and that tech is now everywhere. Seems like exactly what will happen with AI

In absolute numbers I’m not sure that’s true. But 4GLs aren’t what replaced assembly for anyone. C, C++ and Pascal were the most common assembly replacements.

As for C and C++, there definitely aren’t fewer of them in absolute terms. And even in relative terms they are still incredibly popular.

All of that is beside the point though. The hype around 4GLs wasn’t that they would replace older programming languages. The hype was that they’d replace programming as a profession in general. You wouldn’t need programming specialists because domain experts could handle programming the computer themselves.

This is exactly the same hype around AI coding.

You're telling me big data went away?

Right in the bin next to your DevOps.

There was also a mini bubble around social media aggregators and RSS feeds culminating in sites like gada.be

I see the dynamic as follows (be warned, cynical take)

1) there are the youth who are seeking approval from the community - look I have arrived - like the person building the steaming pile of browser code recently.

2) there are the veterans of a previous era who want to stay relevant in the new tech and show they still got mojo (gastown etc)

In both cases, the attitude is not one of careful deep engineering, craftsmanship or attention to the art, instead it reflects attention mongering.

Before crypto, don't forget the ProgrammableWeb and all the mashups that ensued, with programmableweb.com shutting down in 2023.

2010: https://web.archive.org/web/20100226043552/http://www.progra...

Trustless Agents and the Agentic Economy is now in that cycle. Will it stick? Builders gotta build something.

2026: https://agentscan.info/

I am guessing this is sort of ProgrammableWeb 2.0.

Disintermediation is the common thread in all of this.

Will be interesting to see solutions arising for developers to monetize their open-source contributions. Pull Request = Push Demand so perhaps there should be a cost attached to that especially knowing that AI will eventually train on it.

No, AI is different because we're actively doing useful stuff with it. It's not "this will replace x soon", it's "I don't x anymore because it would be crazy not to use AI for this, which is what I do on a daily basis already."

"No, NewBigTech _is_ different, trust me, I'm an expert in all the things this tech does for us now."

Crypto was doing stuff in 2012, it contributed to a huge amount of global remittance payments even then, and probably still does now.

I was working with intelligence agencies, and crypto was being widely use in a variety of crimes too. Both of those are still probably true, and then there's now probably an entire industry shipping literally billions of $ around the world every day as settlement between exchanges in crypto.

As someone who was approached as an expert at the time, I was saying all the things you're saying to me now at the time about Crypto.

The point is I was right at the time: crypto was being used, and still is. You're right, AI is being used, and still is.

The problem, or the bubble or the pump/dump/parallel element is that the amount of attention and capital flowing around the area is vastly more than the current use cases and is therefore largely speculative.

This is true in AI too. Yes people are using it already daily, but if everyone is already using AI for everything, then why do we need a few hundered billion dollars more of datacentres, chips, RAM and powergen, what's that for...? "Future AI stuff..." soooo.... speculative...?

> if everyone is already using AI for everything, then why do we need a few hundered billion dollars more of datacentres, chips, RAM and powergen

Because everyone is already using AI for everything. That proves its value.

But of course the future isn't evenly distributed yet and only a tiny fraction of 1% of us are using AI all day so far. But once somebody gets converted they don't / can't go back to the old way. And converting them is pretty much instant.

Just like cryptobros will tell you they are doing useful stuff with their latest shitcoin. It's exactly the same thing.

In those years of crypto, did you actually build anything relevant to the world? It sounds like you were in the wrong bubble and now have sour grapes.

Meanwhile im using AI coding agents to build a B2B Saas.

I don't know how relevant to the world another b2b sass platform is. You could easily grab one from github which is where AI is got the data to build one in the first place.

Meanwhile cryto offers an alt banking platform used by many who have been debanked.

I could be building a game, a home blog, any sort of OSS.

The point im making is that crypto exists purely as this alt investment, trading tokens to get rich. Im skeptical its actually being used as a currency in any real currency-fashion. But now seems to be stuck in pump and dump schemes.

Meanwhile, AI is enabling people right now, today, to help build and learn things they normally wouldnt do.

> I could be building a game, a home blog, any sort of OSS.

Classic speculative AI developer;)

> Meanwhile, AI is enabling people right now, today, to help build and learn things they normally wouldnt do.

Are you sincerely suggesting nobody ever built or learnt anything from crypto?

I am sincerely saying that no one built anything useful with crypto beyond trading platform which are almost entirely pump and dump

"Im skeptical its actually being used as a currency in any real currency-fashion."

I don't know what qualifies as real currency-fashion to you but you can purchase things and services from many different places. At times credit card payment processors may be down you can use bitcoin to pay. It doesn't have to replace a currency it can be used as another way to spend or collect money.

It's also good in situations where you want to accept money but not open yourself up to risk like a donation button. A risk exists selling a product via credit card around chargebacks this method removes that risk.

In practice it works well and is being used. It's not replacing the dollar but it doesn't need to.

I was a crypto researcher - I watched all the people like you run to the bubble telling themselves they're building the next b2b crypto SaaS:)

Am I running to the bubble? What I’m saying is I’m using AI as a tool today in a normal industry app, and has greatly improved my performance.

A big difference between crypto and AI is around how crypto could paint a better future once we rebuilt most of our transactional infrastructure and persuaded a quorum to move onto it, and how I personally am benefiting from AI day by day to build myself tools and infrastructure for my life, work, businesses and finances only requires me to accept this change. Everyone else in the world could reject AI-augmented engineering, and I will still be tremendously better off.

You're right.

AI will offer us a utopia when we've finished rebuilding all of our electricity infrastructure and finally got enough AI datacenters, and stopped muggle humans buying memory and GPUs because AI needs them more.

I'm pretty certain I read the sentence above about crypto sometimes around 2015.

This said I remember when the internet was a fad that wasn't going to stick around according to some people, so there is that.

I agree! AI, crypto and dotcom were all hugely valuable and world changing. It's a shame they were all afflicted with hypes and bubbles along the way.

Internet -> Obvious value, more efficient communication, knowledge sharing, transactions etc.

AI -> Value is very obvious to me as a developer.

Blockchain -> ? What is the actual value? Something about decentralized finance and not having to trust anyone? And the tradeoff is every transaction costs $10 or more. It was always a dubious proposition with its "value" driven by speculative investment which fueled the hype machine.

Yeah there are parallels in that in all cases people got really excited about something tech and poured a bunch of money in, but the outcomes and actual amount of value derived can be wildly different.

You see that you're assessing AI from the depth of the AI bubble and coming to the same conclusion about AI as people who assess crypto from the depths of a crypto bubble came to, right?

The dotcom bubble was due to all the useless, speculative stuff people were doing with the internet, not the useful bits you referred to that are still around which we use today.

The AI bubble is coming from all the useless, speculative stuff people were doing with AI, not the useful bits you referred to that are still around which we use today.

... You see where I'm going with this, right?

Crypto use cases that are still around that get used today are are not hard to find for anyone sincerely wanting to accept that they exist. I've already listed a few in other posts. That's not my point though.

My point is there's a speculative bubble around AI, and that's got a lot of parallels to the speculative bubbles around crypto and dotcom. Everything you've said supports the idea that you're unaware that you're talking from inside a bubble.

> It was always a dubious proposition with its "value" driven by speculative investment which fueled the hype machine.

Explain to me - without speculation or hype - why we still need trillions more datacentres, power, water, money and everything else for AI, if we're already using it and it's already here and we're already getting the most out of it?

The argument for more datacenters is 2 fold:

- Likely to be a zero sum winner. The Players that have invested now, do not want to be left behind.

- The improvement and capabilities in agents continues to grow. There is no reason to believe this will slow down any time soon

I said explain without speculation. You've just given 2 points that both reduce down to "potential but unquantifiable future benefits", or "speculation".

> There is no reason to believe this will slow down any time soon

Now you're trolling, surely?

Im explaining why there are datacenters being built.

> Now you're trolling, surely?

https://epoch.ai/benchmarks

Models are getting better every month. Do you disagree?

Since you're very active with the commenting, what would you say is your definition of "bubble"?

Cyclical speculative investment.

All investment is kind of speculative: you're betting on the future, but typically for a reason.

A bubble, IMO, is what emerges when lots of people bet on the future purely because they see others betting on the future. People often don't realise they're doing it, like the people building AI SaaS apps. They think they're going to get rich because they think everyone is using the bubble tech.

Most of the apps are rubbish and could be implemented with something other than AI, same as a lot of crypto apps or dotcom websites in the bubble periods.

They look like they're useful in the bubble, because they're getting regular customers (as everyone comes in to try this newfangled AI/Crypto/dotcom tech) but once everyone's tried it, the only people who come back are the ones with the actual use for it, and there's never enough use to support the hype created in bubbles.

The difference is, for the claims of blockchain, it was trivially easy to look at and say, "This could have been a database".

Almost every single blockchain "product" (outside of the peer-to-peer trustless currency ) could have been a database.

This time the cost of entry of small software products has cratered.

For example, I was able to knock up a tool for a guide-maker for a niche game I play that gets about 500 peak daily players on steam.

The entire motivation for the tool is because I personally struggle to follow their well written guide. It takes a reasonable amount of focus and care to adjust a bunch of settings between "runs" based on the guide as written. Getting one of these wrong can set you back a bunch of time without even realising what went wrong.

These settings have an import/export feature in game, but that only allows for a few saved presets, and isn't easy to share.

So I've made a tool that lets people create, organise and share these presets.

Literally the only user is likely to be this single guide maker. Possibly a few others might use it to consume their guides.

Without claude-code, it would never have been reasonable for me to invest the time to make the tool. It would have been an idle dream sitting on my "I wish I had the discipline to make this" pile.

But I don't have the discipline to make that kind of project. I'm too easily distracted, and I'd have got bored of the idea before I'd finished establishing all the boilerplate, let alone before ironing out all the bugs. I also don't have the front-end talent to make things look pretty with CSS.

The LLM doesn't get demotivated. It doesn't get bored, and compressed the building of the prototype down to a day or two. Enough to keep my interest until feedback arrived. A week later, and it's shipped with 50+ issues raised and fixed.

> The difference is, for the claims of blockchain, it was trivially easy to look at and say, "This could have been a database".

Yes, and it's trivial now to look at so many LLM startups and say "that could be a complex if/else statement" or "that could be an Alexa skill" or "I can do that already with my mobile phone".

Everything you've just described about the impact of the friction of you doing your work, and how AI has solved that, is essentially what crypto promised and delivered for a certain subsect of finance, which is why crypto still has market caps in the trillions.

AI will do the same, make a notable change on a certain sub sector of work.

My point isn't that AI is useless, it isn't that it won't add value. It's hugely valuable and will change the world in way people don't even realise, just like dotcom and crypto did and do. Right now though, the disruption and investment is disproportionate and speculative, which is why it has parallels to crypto and dotcom.

Crypto only looked like it solved friction in places with messed up banking.

To people in the EU/UK who had free faster payments before Bitcoin was a thing, it never looked like an improvement at all.

The solution expensive and slow banking was always political, not technical.

Crypto was purely speculative, because it was never solving real problems.

I'm not speculating about problems being solved, I'm out there solving real problems. No-one in "blockchain" ever got to say the same. It was always a promise of things being better. And for many people, things already were better than what was being promised.

> Crypto only looked like it solved friction in places with messed up banking.

AI only solved friction in places work messed up, like giving developers enough time to program stuff.

> To people in the EU/UK who had free faster payments before Bitcoin was a thing, it never looked like an improvement at all.

To tech companies who were already content with their development team's velocity, AI never looked like an improvement at all.

> The solution expensive and slow banking was always political, not technical.

The solution to developers not coding fast enough was always political, not technical.

> Crypto was purely speculative, because it was never solving real problems.

AI was purely speculative, because it was never solving any problems. (Sorry, I have to point out here you said higher up a bunch of problems that Crypto was solving, and now you're saying how it was also speculative, which is the parallel between crypto that you were trying to argue against).

> I'm not speculating about problems being solved, I'm out there solving real problems. No-one in "blockchain" ever got to say the same. It was always a promise of things being better. And for many people, things already were better than what was being promised.

Again, either you're right above when you said crypto solved problems where banking was bad, or you're right here where you're saying blockchain never solved anything.

You're going round in circles trying to find a way that AI isn't like crypto whilst giving more examples of how AI is like crypto.

Remittance, micropayments, unbanked people, unstable economies: all of these did, can and do have problems solved by blockchain.

This generalizes to any investment bubble "this time it's different".

> and tokens are used not as trading , but transactional currency to do that building.

I think it's funny that you highlight this, because for many blockchains, their native token is the transactional currency also.

Which opens up the possibility for a marketplace around it, as well as an incentive to grift to recoup one's investment.

AFAIK there's no similar market for LLM tokens (the price may fluctuate, but the AI companies set it, and they can't be resold), but the grift works by instead selling the outputs from using the tokens.

Sure, but that’s presumes the output is something people want to buy, which presumes it is useful. Sure it can pump if useless, but the longer term dump if useless is what separates it from coins.

> the grift works by instead selling the outputs from using the tokens.

is it grift if I want the output, and its contributing usefully to the work I am doing now,?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com