mattbrewsbytes

Politics is about framing, posturing and perception. Engineers tend to focus on data, science and part of our job is testing a hypothesis, reviewing results and shifting a solution.

A lot of software engineers make a lot of money in the US from very right/center leaning companies. Its hard to have an honest opinion on political topics like AI data centers, government funding towards AI/tech companies, etc. when some element of those are tied to your career. Even indirectly - funding up across the industry helps everyone out in the industry (same can be said for layoffs, it impacts the industry too).

A corollary might be commercial airline pilots. It might be hard for them to be environmentalists because of the pollution jets create, but they might love aviation so much that they are blinded to the detrimental things their career may contribute to the environment. Engineers loving programming and computing so much that they turn a blind eye towards massive build outs of data centers.

Its called cognitive dissonance.

I need to have the system running day and night

Buy a server or rent a VPS. Take the cost of either of the Apple options and divide by 36 months and get the biggest server you can for that monthly price.

Usually when talking about bubbles bursting its about a stock market bubble. P/E ratios now are approaching/passing the P/E ratios during the dot com boom/bust. Another reference point with high P/E ratios was around 1929-1930 (there are others too).

The dot com boom can be thought of as ecommerce which enabled investing in a lot of silly ideas at the time. A key technology that underpinned it all and won out was search. Every ecommerce site felt like they needed search, there were search engine companies, lots of competition across google, yahoo, etc.

An interesting lens to put on AI and the current stock market is that the software will be commoditized, its an eventuality. Its trending towards being able to run LLMs locally and get decent output. Decent is subjective but output similar to Q4 of 2025 models is when we started seeing more consistently usable output.

I believe that will a potential the inflection point for a bubble bursting the stock market: local or DIY LLMs producing "good enough" output and companies publicly backing away from enterprise contracts, lowering their AI spend if they can find cheaper ways to do it.

AI support agents, chatbots, etc. on web sites these days are the equivalent to search engines during the dot com boom. Everyone felt that having a search engine on their dot com was the killer feature that was going to win. There were a lot of companies building search engine technologies and selling them too. Now its ubiquitous that most ecommerce sites have a search bar but nobody cares about the underlying technology much, its consolidated and commoditized.

Good on Intercom for getting acquired.

If we're seeing larger consolidation/acquisitions happen, does that mean the hype train has hit a key station?

You do a great job not curating content. If people are complaining about the plethora of JS frameworks years ago or "everything is AI" these days, its a reflection of what people are discussing online.

Now I'm waiting for these ideas to collide and once the hoopla about AI hits a lull, everyone's going to go re-invent parsing the DOM, again and we'll see lots of new AI generated JS frameworks.

is kinda fake and unauthentic

I think Apple can't find their voice since Steve Jobs passed/stopped doing the presentations. Thats why it feels inauthentic. I imagine its also hard to really feel "best (iphone|ipad|macos|etc) yet" when they are debuting features that existed elsewhere for a while. Its just a massive disconnect from anyone but fans. The same could be said for innovative features, whats left to innovate on smart phones?

In some ways both things are like having to be the person coming on after an amazing presentation or comic or musical act. How do you follow it?

Your job as an experienced developer is to ship working code, the fact that AI tools are here doesn't change that. I would strive to create as minimal a set of artifacts for AI as possible. Observing where we are today with 6 months or 12 months ago means the state of the art is constantly shifting. Spending a lot of effort implementing some concept you've read about or watched others talk about online might not be useful in 6 months. Its hard to discern valuable content vs. stuff people are finding gets lots of clicks these days.

If what you're creating isn't shippable to a customer/user then really scrutinize it. Things like AI skills, AI task loops, etc. those are all throw-away artifacts, the equivalent of Jira tickets. If you can get AI to help delivery without them, do that. The AI lab companies want you to use tokens but if you can automate something without AI in the mix, since you're experienced I assume you know shell scripting, automation concepts, etc., then automate it to work without token use. This is especially if you are doing something solo - your process and workflow can change on a whim so the least amount of overhead is going to keep you lean and focused on shipping software.

Letting new stocks marinate in the market and get 4 quarters of SEC filings along with following all the GAAP accounting practices will definitely help evaluate them before inclusion. The last large boom/bust cycle had a couple of companies, at least, that were doing illegal things. I'm not stating that these three are, just that nobody knows and the process should play out.

I do wonder if any of these three companies are using AI to do their accounting and bookkeeping. What happens when there are AI hallucinations affecting those outcomes?

It might be a good idea to move to entire market index funds (VTI for example) for a few months around these IPOs to minimize the blast radius to your portfolio which still includes them in case of massive upside. If there is a downturn in the markets, its also a great time to be buying in, so keep up those contributions.

A major reason for the waiting period before being added to indices is to see 4 quarters of results, accounting practices, and all the fine print on those SEC filings. All sorts of other ETFs and mutual funds index off the indexes so the market will not have the waiting time to ascertain if these companies balance sheets and accounting practices are filled with bullshit.

Is it possible that one of these IPO's would be like a Global Crossing or Enron having an IPO during the dot com timeframe and would being auto-included into indexes be a good idea? Certainly not. I'm not claiming any of these companies are cooking their books or committing fraud, etc. only pointing out that there was a reason for the waiting period and part of that reason is seeing results held up to accounting standards.

Or possibly an elevated number of AI Slop Cannons aiming their LLM generated hallucinations at github hosted repos?

I'm just an internet commenter who knows nothing about running a retail store and has thought about a bookstore as well. With that out of the way, finding high margin items to sell to offset low margin items would make sense. I think this is why you see coffee paired with bookstores, coffee should be high margin but might also require food licensing/inspections.

Ideas for a local bookstore: seasonal and local items for sale, think gift giving timeframes - mothers day, fathers day, end of year holidays. Items like unique greeting cards, calendars, custom gift wrapping, having a kids section with higher margin items kids like - toys, trading cards, etc. Also you could throw some checkout friendly things like book lights, book marks, candies, etc.

If you find local craftspeople, offer some shelf/floor space for free if you can agree on a split of the margin. Hand-crafted things would pair well during holiday seasons and advertised properly might get repeat visits and word of mouth spreading.

You could say the same about software. In both cases someone is looking at a screen typing things. One is used for communicating with other humans, the other is used for communicating with computers. For sure there are software engineers working on projects where its not apparent how it generates value and it may not actually generate value.

In the dot com boom there were companies spending like $100+ on ads per $1 of revenue. The cost of customer acquisition was insanely high because of the hype of ecommerce and it was being subsidized by VC and IPO's.

This AI boom feels similar, a lot of hype and the AI usage costs are being subsidized by private equity/VC so far. IPO's are supposed to happen this fall for OpenAI and Anthropic. They're going to have to face the music of corporate governance, accounting rules, reporting revenue, earnings, etc. Subsidizing users seems unsustainable, they need to either jack up rates or downgrade usage per plans. Then there is the circular investments between all of them and Google, Microsoft, etc. Seems like a house of cards.

The race to invent variants of Gas Towns, Ralph loops, pump out videos, blogs, etc. showing off greenfield development with cleverly named agents running in parallel is another case of engineering people diving head first into Resume Driven Development.

Sure there are industry changing things going on. What if you're working on an app thats a decade old and has had different teams of people, styles, frameworks (thanks to the JS-framework-a-week Resume Driven Development)? Some markdown docs and a loop of agents isn't going to help when humans have trouble understanding what the app does.

I think there's merit in a privacy first, no ads, no global/viral content app/service like this; there have been a lot of threads here on HN with related sentiment. I think the challenge is more a business problem - how do you pull users in when people may be scattered across various platforms? Are you finding that a single user purchasing a $2/mo plan pulls in additional users?

Back then your typical management, who frequently followed "you can't go wrong with picking IBM" in their decision making, would question open source software and take actions to stop it from being used (like blocking sites in a corp firewall). Open source software was a counter culture then, now its common and mainstream.

Another difference is large companies using user's data in various ways, some creepy and maybe nefarious. This wasn't done 25 years ago, UI heat maps didn't come about until 20ish years ago, much less collecting data specific to one person.

These days, there's no push back on OSS and companies and individuals might prefer to not have all their usage and data sent to a giant corporation. There could be a turning point for OSS LLM's that can add value and run on personal devices (laptops, phones). Maybe there will be a resurgence of apps (desktop/phone) that have AI features but don't collect your data. Maybe that's the next digital counter culture movement - keeping data private.

Its 10x code generation with .5x quality at best and all other parts of the SDLC are at 1.x or worse.

AI is not delivering 10x shareholder value, anywhere. Software developers have quite the level of hubris about how important they are to companies. Yes our work is very complex and takes a certain mindset to do it well. It takes a lot of other roles to have a successful business, many of those roles will use AI to help draft slide decks, emails, etc. and that's the limit for them.

Look at recent companies doing layoffs claiming its because of AI, like CloudFlare and Coinbase, do their reported financials paint the picture that they are crushing it with AI? No, its net losses into the $100's of millions.

If you want to look at facts (these come from yahoo finance): 36% of their stock is held by institutions, another ~9% by insiders. Ebay is 95% held by institutions (that sounds insane but I don't follow markets, maybe its normal) and it went up 11% yesterday. That sounds like institutional traders think this is real, right? Ebay is at or near an all time high so why would anyone want to buy at an all time high? Maybe this is a pump and dump on ebay by Wall St? Get retail traders hyped, your stock bumps 10% or more, then dump shares.

I don't understand how a smaller publicly traded company can buy a larger publicly traded company. Don't they need to have a majority of shares or enough to demand a board seat? A deal like that probably needs to have outside investors and/or some leverage of some kind.

Its always been like this, I think some of it is perspective. When you reach your early twenties you are likely exiting a childhood and schooling bubble where your focus has been friends, family and school. Once you emerge from that and start interacting with the workforce you become more attuned to things going on locally/globally where before it wasn't really a concern. Probably more so for your generation because of the internet and social media the speed of information sharing is much faster and more readily available.

My opinion on how things could progress in 5-10 years is it depends on how much the average people push back. It could be pushing back on AI data centers, loss of freedoms, CEO pay ratios, etc. The intensity of the push back could impact events.

That HN is turning into reddit with posts that don't contribute to the startups, tech, engineering, entrepreneurship, or science topics that its contributors used to focus on.

Reciprocal agreements aren't new, sometimes they're used to gain access to a market the other party already has established a foothold in for other industry segments. These companies operate in the same general industry: tech/internet so it could be complementary services they are each after.

So far both of these companies have shown they suck at support so we know that's not it. It could be that it might help Anthropic to leverage Gemini in their competition with OpenAI and Google will take compute commitments.

Anecdata: I'm finding a lot of my "type random question in URL/search bar" has decent top Gemini answers where I don't scroll to results unless I need to dive deeper.

I recall reading multiple AskHN posts about people trying to get attention from a cloud provider because they ran up thousands of dollars in charges accidentally. I've seen large companies do this too, even if you think something is just a dev environment, its the cloud provider's production environment and they will charge you per their ToS for everything you use, doesn't matter what the customer usage profile looks like.

I think you hit the nail on the head. This is a new VibeCodeBro culture where people are putting out a lot of media content about "building is easier than ever now and its a gold rush", "you can have the agents work for you while you're anywhere", etc. And they will make a lot of money from social media ads or pimping their courses or idea lists, etc. Its very similar vibe you saw with drop-shipping, and other "passive" income content, granted the VibeCodeBros aren't claiming its passive but the vibe online from content creators is very similar.

Most of the AI output I get is mediocre and needs human reviews, UI touch-ups, refactors, etc. There could be a strong case for AI slop cleanup businesses soon.

Agents, skills and rules are just text files with instructions to the LLMs on how you like your output. At this point I don't think it really matters what you call anything or where you put them in your system, as long as you tell the agent/clanker of your choice where these files are located.

The key point is you are breaking up the context of what you are building into smaller areas of focus. The smaller contexts allow agents to do work with only the context of what their tasks are, so you have less of a chance of hallucinations and they each get a larger context window than they would if you had all of your context written out into a single text file.

This is why a lot of folks call them junior engineers. You wouldn't ask a junior engineer to "act as a senior expert JS developer and build a front end for a SaaS project management app" and expect them to do it with good output. You need to define specific things you want done and how you want them done - "use react, call APIs for data, APIs should be RESTful, etc." You can add personas to them if you like and personalities but thats more for entertainment.

I think this is a lot more common and I suspect people decide to do monthly and that they'll cancel after catching up on shows ... and then they don't cancel. So I'm sure the streaming services don't care that people do this because they might come out ahead anyways.

Epic has many stable and valuable businesses

I don't think their approach is getting to stable, valuable businesses and keeping them that way. Their company name is Epic, not Mediocre BlueChipGameCo. I think their approach has been to make big investments into things, almost like Amazon's earlier approach where they would re-invest everything into the business and that might be where Epic now has to react to the market slowing for them and pull back.

I have to imagine AI is having an impact but not in the way people jump to about them using AI. How many people out there have ideas for games and can't execute them because they don't know the tech? How many people in the software industry were drawn to computing because of gaming?

If they built AI into Unreal Engine so that someone could approach it from a Game Producer/Designer role and not have to get deep into C++ programming or shaders and art assets, and produce games, games that go to the Epic Game Store and they take a cut? That would move the market in a way that would be more fitting for their company name.

Developers are going to be more productive, just not how you think. If history is going to rhyme, then the software industry will enter into a self-serving productivity craze building all sorts of software tooling, frameworks, ralph wiggum loop variants, MCPs, etc. much like the surge in JS frameworks and variants in the past. Most of those things will not have any business value. Software devs, myself included, love to do things "because I can" and not necessarily because they should.

Smart organizations will not just deliver better products but likely start products that they were hesitant to start before because the cost of starting is a lot closer to zero. Smart engineering leadership will encourage developers into delivering value and not self-serving, endless iterations of tooling enhancements, etc.

If I was a CTO and my competitor Y fired 90% of their devs, I'd try to secure funding to hire their top talent and retain them. The vitriol alone could fuel some interesting creations and when competitor Y realizes things later, their top talent will have moved on.

I have a CS degree and they taught class with Pascal, not exactly a marketable skill so I did tech support at first. Every day I still feel stupid about something, I think that just goes with the industry we're in. There is too much going on to be an expert in everything.

I also worked at a couple of F500 companies, they typically want people with Bachelors degrees at a minimum, mostly as a check-mark on their hiring list. If you're contracting with an agency/headhunter house then they may be the ones shortchanging you, not the company doing the contracting.

I think even if AI can help developer productivity, there are a lot of other elements to software delivery and speeding up developers isn't necessarily going to speed up overall project delivery. A hard question to answer then is, what is the ROI if an organization is spending $10k/month on AI tools but project deliveries are mostly the same as before?

If the AI tool companies increase their rates 2x, 5x, 10x, is it worth it? They aren't going to lower prices.

Consumer AI tool usage isn't going to get a lot of adopters that will pay, people outside of a work environment will see it as a fun toy, much like social media and will be fine with being served ads and letting their loss of privacy be the cost.

You asked for tools/methods.

I've spent hours and hours unsubscribing, deleting, uninstalling, toggling settings,but then I find myself reinstalling, resubscribing

You already know the tools and methods. This is more of a psychology issue rather than technology. You need some sort of dopamine detox. I'm not a professional, there are probably professionals out there that can help but here's some random thoughts of what that might look like:

* Take a week off work and turn off all notifications. Tell work you are unavailable.

* Write anything important down on paper that happens in the next two weeks: birthdays, events, appointments, etc. so you don't miss them. A paper calendar planner works.

* Turn off the phone if you can. If you need it for travel - uninstall everything unnecessary and keep all the notifications off. Phone, maps, airline, Uber, SMS, web browser are really all you need. You could ditch the airline app and just get paper boarding passes.

* Do something, anything, that doesn't involve computers/phone and notifications.