SO STOP FUCKING HOOKING UP LLMS TO EVERYTHING YOU FUCKING MORONS!!!

> I went out to enjoy the Half Moon Bay 4th of July parade, occasionally checking in and prompting the next step for Fable from my phone.

This intensification of work will not be good for workers’ health. Like, put your phone down man. You can’t be modeling this behavior to young people.

Further, the intensification of work is probably not even good for productivity in the long term. This periodic half-thinking about things without stepping away from the problems you are working to solve will lead to more half-assed solutions. Ideas need room to breathe and dedicated focus.

I've been reading articles that are telling me how they're prompting from their phone at 2am(and how they know that's not great) and when they're out driving their kids to their activities etc. They say all that as if it's something to be proud of. And what for? Oh they released all these packages that no one is going to use.

Burnout is real and these people have lost track of what's important.

I worked for a startup in Canada, with Dutch founders, and operations in France and California.

That meme about how different countries treat out-of-office is very accurate.

Idk about you but this type of intensification of my work has been extremely good for my mental health, on all points:

1. I feel genuinely more productive, spending a lot less time on boilerplate and much more of my genuine time is spent thinking and communicating the thinking process.

2. I can take a ton of breaks, basically whenever I want. "Flow" is now entirely design flow and can be interrupted much more easily without damaging it.

3. If there is anything I actively dislike in my workflow or that makes me not enjoy my time... I can fix my workflow so that either I'm not the one doing it, or the item in question is no longer necessary.

AI is crazy. I get it, if you're at a shitty job that doesn't understand how to adapt well, it's tough... but if you're working on your own (like Simon does on this project), it's absolutely amazing and you're in full control of your life.

I love how this completely personal opinion and experience is getting downvoted. The blind hate on anything AI on HN is mind boggling. True ostrich behaviour.

Please don't post such low effort comments. Complaining about the downvotes is a faux pas.

Ask AI to tell you five reasons you _could_ be downvoted for this post.

It's not low effort. I've noticed the blind AI hate on HN and I talked about it before. I think that "downvotes on the report of an experience" is good evidence of this. People don't want to hear that AI coding has positive outcomes.

Ideally it means a massive relaxation of the 9-5.

For my personal efforts yes I very much want on demand access, I want the thoughts to flow. It doesn't feel like that would be anything but great at my job too, if my job didn't define such narrow bounds of mandatory butts in chairs. What work says it wants is not effective, is not going to get my best work, is not going to really make sense. It didn't make sense before & it's absurdly out of pace with the Happy Warrior mode of software development today.

>>> I went out to enjoy the Half Moon Bay 4th of July parade, occasionally checking in and prompting the next step for Fable from my phone.

>> This intensification of work will not be good for workers’ health. Like, put your phone down man. You can’t be modeling this behavior to young people.

> Ideally it means a massive relaxation of the 9-5.

Why? That's the time they've purchased. They'll just demand that and more. "People like Simon Willison are prompting during their 'off time,' and that's expected under our new ways of working."

Also, being always on, always available doesn't sound like it would amount to "massive relaxation."

To late

You either do it, or you are out

The AI labs are racing to create a moat out of trillion-parameter models and the GPUs that can run them. The problem is this is the wrong architecture for most AI inference use cases. On-device inference is where this is going, clearly Apple believes this too. So Zitron is entirely correct about this AI datacenter build out being a boondoggle with no ROI.

They have proven to the world they have a deterrent akin to a nuclear weapon, but they can actually use it.

> they have a deterrent akin to a nuclear weapon

Far from akin to. It's a good deterrent. Tehran still isn't Pyongyang.

Not denying they're getting great leverage from that. I still don't quite understand why the shortcut is supposedly so irreplaceable.

Perhaps because modern economies are allergic to long-term planning.

Perhaps. And seemingly also a bit even to short-term reactive adaptation?

It is not irreplaceable - you can avoid it as a shipping route and take a longer route. It's just more costly because it is a long route. Which means higher oil prices, which is universally unpopular everywhere with the citizens. (In oil-importing economies, oil prices have a rippling effect as any increase in oil prices increases the transportation cost of goods there by resulting in price increases of all such goods).

That's pretty much what I've been thinking. Maybe I'm underestimating how much more expensive, but it seems for most of those ships if they'd got going on an alternative route instead of crowding around the peninsula they'd be arriving soon. For all I know the goods they're carrying may already have been sold at a rate assuming the cheap freight of course...

No, they need to ditch drive letters first. The NT kernel and NTFS don't even require them (I used to mount disks without drive letters back in the NT 4 era). They just don't care enough to get rid of this annoyance.

Nobody wants to use \??\GLOBALROOT\Device\HarddiskVolume3\ in their paths.

Nonsense. You can mount filesystems to mount points in much the same way as is done in Unix. No one would ever need to do that.

You can indeed use mount points like C:\mountdir, but that's still on the C drive, which is a drive letter. It's not "no drive letters".

And if \ was an alias for C:\ this would just be \mountdir.

users , especially non-technical, find it highly useful in my experience. Is it a net positive to get rid of them, or will it largely only make developers happier ?

It’s arcane and technical for no reason. /Users/ME/Documents, /Media/MyThumbDrive/…, etc. are much clearer and less confusing than C:\…

At the very least, drive letters do make SMB shares a bit simpler for the non technical folks. T:\MyData is easier for them than \\0010-somehost-win.site1.mycorp.loca\Share01\MyData\

I used to support a group of completely tech illiterate users in construction & manufacturing. Them figuring out T:\ was hard enough, ask them to type in a UNC path into the address bar in explorer and you get "Wtf is file explorer? Wtf is an address bar? Where is the backslash key??"

Then in this hypothetical world you could mount \\0010-somehost.win.site1.mycorp.local\Share01 to /Share01 rather than T:

Or just use sane names like \\MyDivision\Share01\MyData and mount that to \Network\Share01 or some such.

Instruments of justice that are capable of being captured are not instruments of justice at all.

So the law is not an instrument of justice then, right… and thus enforcing the law will do nothing to fix the problem of capitalism, since those with capital have already purchased the law?

This situation brought to you by the billionaires behind Chief “Justice” John Roberts.

Not by the billionaires, but by the Eternal Peasant, who will break a billionaire's head with the same exultant sadism as they would yours or mine.

Discusses the concept of Market Socialism, which is a hybrid system meant to avoid the worst aspects of both Socialist and Capitalist systems, while putting the goal of human fulfillment at its center.

Not sure where 40 tokens per second is coming from. I’ve seen 95-100 tokens per second on M5 Max 128GB running Gemma 4 31B. I’ve done experiments where it is faster than Claude Opus 4.5 for the same prompts.

    > M5 Max 128GB

Wild. That must be like a 5,000 USD laptop.

can you provide your configurations pls ?

It's actually a bit faster than that now it seems, about 112 tok/sec.

Configuration:

Gemma 4 31B Instruct Q6K Context size 40960 LM Studio 0.4.13+1 Metal llama.cpp v2.14.0 LM Studio MLX (Apple M5) v1.6.0

Here are my results:

prompt eval time = 32545.36 ms / 5625 tokens ( 5.79 ms per token, 172.84 tokens per second) eval time = 20227.99 ms / 310 tokens ( 65.25 ms per token, 15.33 tokens per second) total time = 52773.35 ms / 5935 tokens

This was for interacting with a local MCP service, running a tool that returns a ~20KB text file to the agent to add to the chat context.

I'm seeing about the same number of tokens/second on an M2 Ultra that I have access to (also with 128GB of memory).

This is surely apples-to-oranges to the OP results (and I don't spend a great deal of time benchmarking these things, so my methodology might be lacking), but it's interesting seeing okay performance for a top open model. For most use, however, I find Gemma 4 26B A4B (Q6K) to be good enough (esp. for MCP calling) and much much faster (~1,200 tokens/second).

Ultimately, information is a public good: it is non-excludable (you can’t stop people from using it) and it is non-rival (we can all use it at the same time). Public goods are often very useful, and because they are non-excludable and non-rival, ultimately can’t have a market-based business model. I would class open-weights AI models as public goods, and would support government expenditure to produce them.

Calculating hourly costs for these models makes me think that the decision of when to hire an SWE vs. increase use of AI may follow a similar pattern to the decision to use cloud compute vs. on-premises. I don’t cost $120/hr (incl. fringe), but my employer pays my salary all year long, no matter if I am working or on vacation. Whereas if they use an AI model to do the same work, they may be happy to pay $120/hr or more, since they may only use the model for a small fraction of 2080 hours per year, so they’d still save money, and not have a messy human to deal with.

The framing of AI vs SWE cost assumes you know what the AI is actually spending. Most teams don't. They see a monthly total, not per-agent/per-step attribution. The decision math only works if both sides of the equation are real numbers. That is the gap Traeco closes. traeco.dev

The framing of AI vs SWE cost assumes you know what the AI is actually spending. Most teams do not. They see a monthly total, not per-agent/per-step attribution. The decision math only works if both sides of the equation are real numbers. That is the gap Traeco closes. traeco.dev

I remain convinced we won’t look at project estimates as time based in software engineering as our primary cost estimate. And this is transition will happen rapidly. We’re going to shift to a capex/token spend model for project estimates where the business will say “ok I do want that feature for $1000 in tokens”.

I agree with you directionally that project estimates are/will be affected by this but I don't see a scenario in which time is completely removed from the equation with respects to projects & estimates to execute on them. We're all constrained by time, finite resource. It's always a factor in business.