InsideOutSanta

The ability to generate a lot of code will not solve any of these issues.

"Eager" is good. "Overeager" is definitionally bad.

Based on my entirely subjective experience, the $100 Moonshot plan using only K3 is comparable to the $200 Anthropic deal using the whole Fable allocation and Opus 4.8 for the rest.

Instead, I've settled on a top-down approach: I write an in-depth spec for the whole app first, then have the LLM implement reviewable sections of it.

That's not a meaningful number, and even if it were, quadrupled isn't nearly enough.

> I started with a simple hello world application. Then added in the habit list, the ability to add a habit, edit a habit and so on.

This hands-on, incremental approach works, of course. But I don't think it is the most effective way of using LLMs to write apps.

Sure, let me give you an example. I bought an Xteink X4 recently so I always have something to read with me. I have a huge dump of epubs from Humble Bundle and other sources. I used to just copy them to my e-book readers and then never read anything because it's impossible to find.

I had Claude write a Python script that sorts the books into a file system structure according to Language → Genre → Sub-Genre → Author. Now the device is actually useful, because I can easily find whatever book I want to read, and it has resulted in my reading much more.

> Are you gaining productivity in high-impact things, or stuff that might scratch an itch but you don't really need all things considered?

I technically don't need much. You could lock me in a room and give me stale bread and water once a day. So I'm not sure why you're applying that standard to the usefulness of LLMs, and I'm not sure what you consider "high-impact things". I'm doing high-impact things for me, but maybe you disagree.

So let me ask you this instead: did you write these types of comments in the past, when people manually built software? If I manually wrote a Python script to sort my books, would you post a comment questioning whether that changed anything in my life?

A lot of the criticism leveled against using LLMs in software development is just criticism against software development in general. Do we really need all this software? I guess not. Can we objectively measure the productivity of software developers? Not really.

For my own projects, little productivity apps for my own needs, I'm easily 20x more productive. I'm building so many more of them, and at a much higher level of polish. But that's simply because I don't care about the code, long-term maintenance, or anything else. I just need them to do a thing, and if they do the thing, I'm good. I used to make an effort calculation before building these things, but now I just tell Claude "hey, build this", and two hours later it's built well enough to be useful.

OTOH, at work, I'm probably about as fast as I was before, maybe even a bit slower. But the quality of my work has increased quite a bit, because I no longer take the shortcuts I used to take to push things out. I'm spending much more time in planning and in code reviews rather than actually typing code.

Either way, the idea that these obvious changes are just people fooling themselves is, at this point, no longer a reasonable position. And the claim that "AI will run out of money and just be turned off due to the huge operational cost" is so implausible that I would feel ashamed of myself if I used this as a straw man for what AI skeptics believe.

1. There is one supplier, so you have no choice. 2. Even if you had a choice to sign the contract, this still means that it's not the same as a trade-in, because trade-ins are always voluntary, but once you have signed the contract, a right of first refusal is not.

In general, the "you chose to sign the contract" argument is a poor justification for bad contracts. If the contract is bad, it is bad regardless of whether you chose to sign it.

It took me a year to write a book. It took OpenAI and Anthropic a fraction of a second to ingest it. Do you understand now why I give zero shits if it takes Anthropic a billion to train a model, and Moonshot 10k in API cost to distill it?

Right, so they're not voluntary.

That's what trust is, though. I find Kagi worthy of trust since I have no evidence that they are doing anything that would violate my trust in them, and their incentives align with mine. I give them money, they give me good search results.

> People are becoming more and more, justifiably, cynical. And it's good for society that they are.

I do not believe that this is good. Democracies are built on trust. Without trust, they die, as we can plainly see in the US right now, where people are so distrustful of each other that it is starting to destroy the very fabric holding together society itself.