Just felt the need to post that.

I tend to work in 5-10 or so parallel streams at a time so that also multiplies token use as a function of time. Much less and I'm waiting for it too much, much more and I can't juggle effectively. My new big project is of course to try to take myself out of the equation further and increase the parallel streams dramatically; pretty hard to get that right so still manual for now.

I feel the value I get far exceeds $600/m. It's a straight expected value calculation for me and I'm happy to pay. I wish they'd make it easier though - just sell me a 100x account for $1k/m and save the messing around.

Same principle. It's a good idea to have a schedule to clean them up periodically - an idea you can also put into a note.

If Alibaba can't bring the chips into China, but can buy a whole bunch in Thailand or Singapore or whereever (or secure exclusive rights via JV partners where relevant) and then just provide them as a service to its customers in China - what is the point? I'm sure many customers would actually prefer such an arrangement.

Probably either the author or the people they interviewed got the specific GPU details mixed up or wrong. Maybe it was B200s.

It's just not plausible to me that we don't find some way to leverage all that power without fatally undermining everything we're otherwise trying to achieve long-term. It's not plausible to me that skilled, knowledgeable developers like you would ever conclude that AI was never useful, always harmful, and that it is critical to the project's long-term health that you must do this 2,000-file internal refactor entirely by hand.

So you do not disagree? You agree 100%? Yes, it is trivial to see. Hence my near-anaphylactic reaction to articles like this, which specifically claim that it is NOT useful. Do you just mentally filter that out or something?

> Is [..] the codebase and my brain's relation to it is in a better state than if I had not used it?

But now this is a different question. It will not be the same, that's for sure. With new tools we must learn new patterns, new best practises. I have come around to the opinion that we must collectively move to a higher level of abstraction and accept that we will understand the code less - but I don't agree it must necessarily be worse. That will all depend on the new techniques we discover and apply.

> So somewhere on the spectrum between no-AI and vibecoding is probably ideal. Where on the spectrum is the argument, and everyone is going to have their own opinions based on their own domains. I don't see this as anyone being wrong or emotional.

I think that anyone planting a big flag at 0 (no AI) in 2026, with what we have available, is indeed doing it for emotional reasons, and when they claim there's no benefit being anywhere else, they're wrong. Which is what the article we're talking about is doing - hence my, and other's, scathing reaction.

I wrote and deleted a couple of answers to this - they didn't satisfy, so I'll just be honest.

No, they don't know anything I don't know. There's now only one reason for denying that AI is helpful in software engineering, and that is emotional, be it fear of change or cultural point-scoring.

The only honest answer to the question, "Is modern frontier AI helpful in most software engineering?" is "Yes, of course it is." Anyone answering differently than that is, by now, simply wrong. Why they are wrong may vary, but they are wrong.

I'm very confident that AI will continue to be available no matter what happens, at reasonable prices. We don't have to guess - we know what the open source models take to run, the hardware, the electricity, everything. They are served at a profit today - no-one is subsidizing them. Anyone can run GLM5.2 or (soon) K3 etc - you have capex and opex, you can serve X tokens per second, you sell them at Y price, it's just maths.

AI is a technology, not a company or group of companies.

Just saying.

And so if someone like the author is trying to argue the contrary, that leads me to believe they either: (1) have not bothered to spend even 5 minutes validating their belief or (2) do not care to test their beliefs against reality, for whatever reason. Either one is a bit of a red flag.

This "Anti AI Social Club" is just the latest example, and reality has nothing to do with it. Denying reality might just be the whole point.

It's a very human thing really.