Incidentally, I just went through a "what font should I use in my terminal" journey for the first time in a long time recently and took a long wandering trip back home to Source Code Pro. There's something about how round and open the letters are that's very readable to me. Compared to a more typewritery tech-y fixed width typeface, it just parses really easily to my eyes.

Why aren't tech companies using their mountains of cash to pay for the build out? Why are they borrowing money through Special Purpose Vehicles? Because they want someone else to share in the risk if the build out doesn't work. The SPV allows them to pay a fixed amount for the privilege of off loading some of the risk. I agree that they are obfuscating risk here in a dangerous way but my broader point was that, on its face, this debt load does not have the sort of pernicious systemic failure that makes downturns into deep recessions.

One, tech isn't a massive employer. The people being employed in all the downstream businesses, the contractors, electricians, etc are in classically cyclical businesses. If this all goes south, this might not be the employment dip that starts a broad recession. Two, the debt is largely being issued by companies with some of the greatest balance sheets in the world. While the CoreWeaves etc of the world would face elimination, the classic big techs probably wouldn't. Three, it matters who the counterparty is. Right now the debt is distributed through private credit, Wall Street banks, REITs, mutual funds, etc. The contagion would reach through private credit to their LPs like pensions, insurance funds etc but as far as we know these funds are not hyper leveraged and over-indexed toward AI.

But yeah the sheer scale of the debt load just cannot be ignored.

Taking malice out of the equation, you have to wonder how much unaccounted financial risk exists in the AI buildout if there's enough risk that LLMs actually degrade because of vectors like this.

There's other problems too, why do we think AI demand is ferocious right now? Nvidia's revenue is one of the biggest signals we use to determine that. Why is Nvidia's revenue so large? They're spending their revenue on more revenue. This process overinflates what AI demand might actually be.

The issue really boils down to that this is a risk that gets reported in a way that makes it look less risky than it really is and therefore actors make investment decisions that they might not otherwise make. Sure, it might work out. But if it doesn't, the pain could be way more painful than it looks on paper.

Having to raise prices isn't a great look but when they come out the other side they can drop pirces and get a boost in volume or they can keep them high and enjoy a bigger profit margin.

The good thing is that most healthy activities feel good to do, so they're self-perpetuating. They don't give the instant shot of dopamine as unhealthy activities but they do give you something. Furthermore, they feed into each other. Doing one habit makes the resistance to starting another less.

The conclusion I've come to is that good taste has been replaced with "works; good enough". Maybe that's the end state. Maybe the end is just a bland mass of tangled code that's junky but it works. Speed over quality has always been a currency in this industry and maybe this is just the purest expression of it.

But at the end, it leaves me with my preferences and tastes and what I think is right and I feel more and more isolated. I don't think the people who are happily using AI tools are incompetent. I know they're not. I think they just are a little more in tune with how the winds are changing.

In the long run, I'm not sure how this ends. Programming is a lifelong pursuit of endless learning. When you use tools like this, your learning becomes stunted. But maybe I'm wrong. Nobody knows.