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Comment by isatty | Hacker News Reader

> The first is to self host. You buy the machine, run open source models locally, and pay nothing per token after that.

Power is not free.

What I’ve found is that you’re basically paying a premium for privacy, and that’s worth it for me.

Luckily I needed a new laptop and I bought an M1 Max secondhand from a friend quite cheaply because it was fast enough to recompile something else I am interested in.

So for me, there is no additional hardware cost; it was acquired in replacement.

I run the AI models at home on this kit because I want to; I'll use openrouter if I need to.

I accept the economics of this article are right. But I feel so incredibly sad about this outcome that we're now just to be people caretaking machines that do the job we loved that actually I am not sure that exercising this nuance is going to matter in the long term.

It turns out it is a mistake I have made in my life — now really unfixable because I am a bit too old — to believe that I will always find enough fulfilment in my work to offset the absence of personal fulfilment elsewhere; I have always enjoyed being able to help people directly by doing a thing I love and I am good at, and that has kept away the sadness of finding it difficult to build a conventional family life to enjoy.

I assumed I would always find some new way to find that enjoyment, but even the slim enjoyment from being able to explore this stuff on my own kit in my own terms will not be enough if the pendulum does not swing back towards human effort.

It is a dismal world we have made for ourselves. Lately I have found myself dreading growing too much older in it.

You sound awesome. Just venting? (b/c curious if friends can fill your heart abundantly, & we know we're never too old to make new friends!)

> dreading

Even avoiding political headlines (OK, at least articles), plenty of cause for dread, so I keep re-focusing to avoid despair. Easier said than done innit!

Can't kill my hope for the future though. One day, all the good stuff shall prevail (morality, intelligence, love & kindness)... maybe not permanently, but a Star Trek future is there somewhere (& they had their troubles but it wouldn't be a dreadful situation overall). Sharing with you in case it's even slightly contagious!

I must say I am not quite just venting. I have been struggling severely with burnout for a couple of years and as I work to fix it by myself ultimately, and get back who I was, the awful thing is finding out that the industry is so utterly and completely different anyway.

So in my fight back I decided that I needed to re-centre myself; learn how these tools can help me personally return to productivity, try to get that deep self-teaching back, reanimate myself consistent with my principles, learn and make things. Take it head on without losing who I was.

I haven’t been a “big projects” developer since the dot com era (when I worked on some pretty cutting edge things). I have been a small projects developer: building things that matter for small businesses and schools, supporting designers, teaching people stuff along the way. I have been productive, I have very diverse skills and I have been valued.

What I have come back to is an industry that has abandoned craft principles or discussions about developer discipline, code quality, efficiency, robustness, resilience, etc., and fully organised itself into a headlong rush towards a kind of nihilistic Metropolis machine-cranking.

And because I am a freelancer (more of a contractor in practice), my competition is already the machine itself. I am one of those developers who is eliminated in the last sentence of the article. I am not needed on big projects and in many small jobs — the kind a burned out small business developer needs to get back to work — I will never be needed again.

It is very odd, trying to learn how to understand the tools that others are using to make you irrelevant.

And when all your friends are obsessed with AI, either clients desperate to use it or friends (in the creative culture I am surrounded by away from work) angry and resentful of it, I find I have just nobody to talk this through with.

In many ways I would rather not have returned to actively using HN (because articles and despair, and because being by oneself it’s possible to get drawn into online arguments) but in recent months I have noticed in the comments that perhaps this is the only place where these discussions among “craft” developers are happening at all.

I am over fifty and safe financially, and if my last day were for some horrible reason out of my control to be tomorrow, that’s OK; I have enjoyed my life and on good days I do still enjoy it. I have friends who I see when I can get myself out of the house, I have distractions I can enjoy, all that.

I am now much more troubled by what it is going to be like to continue to live it. I struggle every day to see where I have value, especially as burnout has left me with less energy to spend.

Like I say, I am safe and very aware I have been blessed; it’s not a cry for help. But I think a lot of us who found value in our work wonder what the fuck we can do to keep ourselves alive the way we were.

ETA: holy shit that was an essay.

I'm younger, but not by much and I too feel instinctively sad by how abruptly the entire industry has changed. And there's no going back. It's because I'm a craftsmen, I care about the code. And you learn in your career that it's a bad idea to care about the code, especially in a business context, which one's career is very much trapped in the business context.

I care about the code because the code is the product interface to the people working on it, my peers and team. The UX around that code affects us every day, every hour. We should care about it! It took me a decade to realize caring about the code is not bad, it's just a dualism we have to hold: two truths. The code is a means to an end, the outcome and end-user value is the only thing that matters, it's true! Also the code matters. The code is a manifestation of the effort and human attention toward an interface that becomes a product that produces business value for people.

Writing code is changed forever. And I'm saddened by it because I spent so much intimate time and attention writing code. I felt proud and it was beautiful to me, the code itself, the APIs created, and the end user state. (I'm a product developer, and believe it or not, I even enjoy CSS). But also the code is just code. AI writes code. And everyone is rightfully so losing their minds over it all. My hours "coding" are changed forever.

But I fully believe the pendulum will swing back to what has always been true. It's not a failure of AI. It's just what has always been true: creating useful and usable product experiences, for people, is hard. It's a very hard iterative feedback loop with experiential, tacit, actions and actors in real life.

So I think, we're ok. The variance is high and wild, but, it's all good, it's all still ok.

Thanks for your writing, I enjoyed it. (edit: TLDR I think you're product person caught in backend-dev circles. Human-centric, make things for people. In this world, AI is more obviously a tool. On the other side of the pool, the more backend-heavy the dev, the more everything is just one skill file away: marketing, sales, UX, design, writing, strategy, consciousness.)

I don't know if this will bring you any comfort, but I think

> And you learn in your career that it's a bad idea to care about the code, especially in a business context, which one's career is very much trapped in the business context.

It's always been this case -- well before LLMs hard pivoted the field. You (theoretically) get paid to create net business value, you don't really get paid "to code". If the product you are creating is code, then yes the priority of code quality can be much higher. Especially in higher IC roles like Staff+, coding is just one of the ways to add that value.

At work I just have to solve the problem at hand with the minimal amount of effort to reach the first acceptable solution. After work while at play, I can explore 10 versions of something at my leisure, just to learn if I want. I can focus on working the thing until it's polished and elegant, because I decide what the priorities are. I can be as selfish as I want.

It's common in art circles that you have a series that you can churn out for money, and you have ideas you explore just for you (that often are far less appealing to non-artists). Pixar used to have a tick-tock cycle like this, "one for them, one for us". They would alternate a sequel bc it would make money and new IP because it would keep the studio fresh.

I don't think accepting this should be depressing. A good life is all about finding balance so that you can sustain it for the long haul!

> I think you're product person caught in backend-dev circles.

I am kind of all the things (product design, dev, front end, training) because at the small end of things you have to be; you don't get directly paid for misery-avoidance but I don't think that's any reason not to do it :-)

But thank you.

Ironically it used to be the case that best developers who actually were able to accomplish something were gradually promoted to management. HArdcore developers who really loved coding were resisting that but there was a pressure definitely. And it makes sense managers are better managers if they know more about the tasks they are managing.

Now every developer is getting promoted to management because they are expected to manage the AI-agents. But their status in the organization nor pay does not really increase does it when every coder is doing that.

One of the metaphorical questions I have been pondering lately, is this:

How interchangeable are shepherds?

Not a question that demands answers in this thread, obviously.

This was very touching to read, thank you for writing this dofm. I feel the same in a lot of ways. -toilet

I hope you can find joy again. People like you, who value the human side, are needed in this world. I agree that in recent years it has been going the wrong way, but to change it we have to work together.

So basically you don't have a life outside of the job?

> now really unfixable because I am a bit too old

How old is a bit too old? I know 50+ colleagues doing sports and traveling just fine.

> So basically you don't have a life outside of the job?

I very much did. A big social life. I may have had more of a social life than most, in fact; I have been so lucky.

But that doesn't change that I am the kind of person who drew a lot of self-worth from being able to use my skills to help people, which was actually what helped me find that life in the first place.

As I mentioned elsewhere I have been dealing with really profound burnout for a couple of years. It is extremely difficult. It has made it distressing to try to cope with busy social environments; I am not hiding but life has changed and other people's lives move on. (Including other freelancers you work with.)

Without a sense of engagement from what I do for a living, I am left with a lot less of a life. And the world of tech has changed in so many ways in just the time I have been trying to recover that it feels difficult to find a place again. It is taking an enormous amount of mental energy to catch up when I have sometimes only been able to focus for about an hour in any three days.

Lately things have been better, and while I am AI-cynical I have been enjoying digging into a new topic and working out what I think, but doing this past the age of fifty when you're burned out is hard work.

> How old is a bit too old?

I was talking about rethinking priorities and really seeking a family life for myself there, and the answer is that I am enough over fifty that there is no fair way to approach that, given my current mental health.

Some things, I'm afraid, do just one day stop being possible. You may not get a do-over after, say, forty-five.

Also, I would anticipate at least a 5 year lifespan for a current generation card. The 3090 is still respectable simply because it has 24GB of RAM which, for years, has been the limiting factor for ML at home. If you got a 6000, sure it’s going to cost 7-8k, but the resale value is likely to be very good. Even the 3090 is 50%+ of RRP still. And if you’re not doing LLMs, it’s an interesting value proposition for “classic” CNN vision model training. You can fit enormous batch sizes on 96 GB. The biggest reason to upgrade is perf/watt has about doubled (eg 4000 pro Blackwell is half the 3090 for similar).

People tend to assume the capex is thrown away but as we’ve seen with RAM, don’t be so sure you won’t be able flip it if you need to.

>> Power is not free.

There's actually an interesting thought experiment here: if it takes you a full day to build something that AI would otherwise build in a day, do you end up using more power, or less? What is the break-even point, purely from a power consumption perspective?

If an identical task takes a day on both sides, then the human route uses less energy, surely.

Brains are thousands or maybe even millions of times more fuel-efficient than computers and you are alive for the whole day either way, right? You probably eat about the same even.

The reason executives think AI is more efficient is that it more space efficient than a human and doesn't demand to be paid or work only a set number of hours. Everything with computing is more efficient if you resent having to give money to other humans. If they could just not have you be alive when they don't need you, it'd possibly be different.

Even though I think at a typical British freelance rate and a truly unsubsidised token price, the AI is possibly more expensive than me. And as a freelancer, from their perspective I really am not alive until they need me. (This is what it often feels like)

The reality is the human and the AI aren't used to build the same things anyway so it's a comparison you can't really make.

Brains are efficient, but civilized humans aren't. In the USA, adults consume at a rate of about 10kW -- only 1-2% of that being the human's metabolism, the rest being HVAC, electrical devices, etc.

For comparison, a modern frontier model like Gemini 3.5 Pro consumes about 15kW -- so only about 1.5x the fully loaded human. In an 8h workday, that model would crank through ~80M tokens (~$5k at API prices). That's ~4 major refactors of a 10k LOC codebase, so probably not a very realistic comparison to a single human dev.

I think a more useful comparison, based on my experience, is that an engineer with AI support can get one 8h day's worth of unassisted work done in 1h. So, the 25 kWh consumed during collaboration (conservatively assuming I keep the GPU hot for the whole hour) frees up the remaining 70 kWh I'll draw down for the day to be spent in some other way.

You forgot to mention that it takes a lot more energy to train that human before they're able to work.

The human in the scenario is on regardless. One has to assume. But I also think this sentence you typed is essentially a single line horror story and we should consider whether it is ever appropriate to say it out loud.

to be pedantic you'd need to think a lot about how you power your human. Did you fuel up your human with beef or beans? local or shipped? were they operating a day in climate control? have to commute? did they need equipment like a large monitor? etc .

in reality basically all those concerns come out in the wash when you factor pay. energy inputs throughout the chain tend to materialize as expense. if the human was paid less then likely they used less energy.

Studies on grandmaster chess players indicate that at most you burn 10% more calories when engaged in deep thought than when you're at rest. So the energy "attributable" to an hour of knowledge work is like 10 calories (average sedentary calorie burn is like 80-100 per hour; add a max of 10% for the thinking gets you 8-10 calories). A pound of potatoes is like a buck and is about 320 calories. So you're looking at like 3 cents an hour at most to cover that energy burn. It's definitely even less; I certainly don't think as hard as a grandmaster chess player.

Then, assume power costs 20 cents per kilowatt hour (US avwrage) To match the human 3 cents per hour, you need an average of 150 watts of power drawn per hour. That's in the range of a budget graphics card, but not much past there.

However, if you sleep instead of sitting around, you can probably make AI cost competitive. Sleeping drops your metabolic rate by more, and lying down in bed (as opposed to sitting) also reduces calorie burn. Combined, you can reduce your burn by like 30 calories an hour. At the new 9 cents per hour human cost, you can afford to run a higher end graphics card at ~450 watts per hour. That puts you in RTX 3090 range.

Excellent analysis, and

> However, if you sleep instead of sitting around, you can probably make AI cost competitive.

important consideration.

Yeah, it gets weird when you start trying to compare human versus AI energy demands because you can turn a computer off, but you can't really turn a human off. Most studies indicate that humans can do 3-4 hours of high-level knowledge work in a day. An AI is not limited by these restrictions; it could do 24 straight hours of work if you wanted it to. So do we count all the energy the human burned for the remaining 20 hours of the day and allocate it to those 4 hours? Or are we just comparing "energy spent working on the task" for the AI and the human?

The jokes are aside now!

Maybe we gotta include all 24, since no one will ever* get the 4 without the 20 of sleep/eat/relax.

*least probably not long term with FTEs I assume

Though for employers who send employees home it should be OK to ignore what employees do outside of work…

What would you do for the rest of the day, power off your devices and go for a long bike ride?

Speaking personally: yes. That's literally what I'm planning to do this afternoon because it's noon and I'm already done with the coding tasks I had on my plate today.

Luckily the future is absolutely going to be that star trek one where technological abundance means we are all wealthy and have free time to develop personally, and not the future where all the money bubbles up into the hands of a thin-skinned malignant narcissist who wants to play with launching rockets and provoking racial violence /s

The question needs to be tweaked a little: it's not just human vs LLM, it's human vs human + LLM, which makes the calculations easier (and more correct because LLMs don't currently operate independently.)

I've run the napkin math, and assuming LLMs make humans even 5% more efficient, the power and water savings over time are significant, largely because humans are so resource intensive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46984659

There is no break even point, you always come out ahead doing it yourself because your caloric burn is the same for the day whether you build the tool or AI builds the tool. Only way the AI example might avoid that is if it tells you to jump off a cliff before starting the compute run.

I'm assuming that you need to feed the human being (i.e. you) regardless of whether you use that human being for writing code or not. So, by this metric, there is simply no breaking even point. The cost of human + AI is always going to be higher than the cost of human.

Actually if you have solar, it kind of is.. so prIvAt AI compute gets defacto cheaper during the day?

If you have solar, it is not, because you have battery and equipment degradation from cycle charging, c’mon man…

I would agree with you if you said it was vastly cheaper overall (with the initial equipment investment amortized over time) compared to The Power Company.

In many states, even if you are generating electricity and selling it back to the power company, they still gonna charge you normal rates of usage because greed.

If you go off grid, you have bigger things to worry about than how to power your AI cluster. It’s manageable enough if you have land but that’s in scarce supply.

> if you have solar, it is not, because you have battery and equipment degradation from cycle charging, c’mon man…

no, the rate of that is pretty independent of use. unless you live in a place where selling energy back rules are designed to screw the solar owner (California)

Melbourne Australia feed in rates have also been significantly reduced since the start.

California, Arizona, Texas, most of the southern states…

And paying more for hardware costs extra!

I ran the numbers and outside of privacy it doesn't make sense. But I did it anyways. [0]

0 - https://www.williamangel.net/blog/2026/05/17/offline-llm-ene...

I'm in Florida and am already using AC, so if not "free", definitely "negligible."

If you paid for solar, this is less of an issue. I also don’t worry so much about running my AC.

What makes you think that paying gives you privacy?

work at a cafe.

You want me to drag my AI rig to a cafe?

> Power is not free.

its ~free if you have home solar.

Solar panels are free and never break and have an unlimited life expectancy?

Solar panel breakage doesn't depend on a graphics card.

Solar power is not free.

You can decide to not fix the panel that was being used to power a GPU.

Or you could sell the power back.

Or you could put it in a battery bank for when the sun is down.

Or, if none of those are the case and you just have excess power that's useless for anything but a GPU, then you prepaid for the GPU.

I love that we have solar panels, but we weren't gifted them. Using power has a cost.

It's actually common to be in that situation where the grid is paying pennies on the dollar and you have extra generation. Most grid-tie systems are in that boat.

Suddenly you find yourself looking for something to spend power on so it doesn't go to waste.

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