VSCode is free. Stackoverflow is free. MDN is free. There are examples out there of every trick in the book, you can even use free AI to find them. You can even hose your website on Github pages for free.

But nevermind that, what's exciting is paying a robot a month's rent to do the thing that you could just go learn how to do in an afternoon?

I real life I meet people who like AI and people who hate it, but nobody who’s on a personal mission to defend Anthropic from anyone that dares to question their hyperbolic marketing.

People who read a lot or get deep into history podcasts and have a hot take on the French Revolution know that this is some whacky shit and if they bring it up explain it first.

TikTok people say the crazy thing and they're surprised when everyone gives them the look. Also the thing they bring up is usually provocative, factually ridiculous, and a little unhinged.

How do you know that?

In 2026 the prices have been spiking. It now costs orders of magnitude more than it did in November.

No, it’s not just one vendor.

The desktop that I grew up using was fundamentally a creative machine. It had games, but I mostly used it write fiction and make art-like stuff. When we got the internet it was AIM and movie trailers, so I could go to rent the movie in a store. Then someone introduced me to Webmonkey and the rest is, well, more making stuff.

It really ought to be possible to capture the creative aspects of technology without opening the door to endless toxic slime.

But it’s never really that straightforward.

There is some truth to the idea that some people enjoy it and others do not. I haven’t seen a pattern between them.

I suspect that the “right” way to use LMs in coding, including accounting for focus, control, and costs is not a settled debate. We probably haven’t even seen the best ideas yet. But I’m really dislike the maximalist approach.

In the real world I still encounter more moderation than not except from people who spend a lot of time on TikTok.

Mostly for fun/scratch my own itch, and using AI as a companion/helper device.

The effect of this is that people who never learned those things are working with a limited toolkit both in solving problems and debugging. And every so often I get to blow someone’s mind with an old trick :)

It’s not all bad though! I’m happy to never build a layout with floats again.

> the thinking time disappeared

It did not. The author decided against spending time thinking. Nobody is following him around whacking him on the head if he blocks off tomorrow morning to go heads down on something. At least, I don't think they are?

A tiny bit of project management discipline can go a long way.

The worst thing about LLMs is they can pass the Turing test, leading people to believe they have an Asimov style robot instead of a very cool statistical model. It feels like they should be able to follow instructions or keep instructions from content separate, but that’s not what’s happening.

(I highly recommend the book. I do not recommend the world it imagines.)

Also, real support! Your email is important, you should be able to open a ticket and reach someone that knows what they’re doing.

It was pretty cheap (many used books are $1) and feels good to have my full library browsable and free from any platform or company.