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I've seen a few negative reactions to my recent vintage mods using AI, and I get it. The tech world is changing rapidly and it's frightening, even for someone who has expected this. I've had existential dread since I first used Claude Code last year Someone on X put it pretty well:

Yes, the status quo in software is dead. As scary as it seems now, it's possible that in a few years these tools will seem commonplace and maybe even boring You'll be able to run coding models equivalent to Opus 5.5 locally on a GPU in your device, so you won't need to "boil oceans" to do it

We are in an early period where demand for compute is outstripping supply, and it's leading to a speculative build-out of datacenters fueled by Big Tech billions that are delivering more capable AI a little sooner, but at a precarious cost I believe locally-run AI will level that out eventually

Also, some people have the mistaken impression that AI agents aren't very capable, based on the shortcomings of AI models as recently as January. But capabilities have improved rapidly, and they are not slowing down In the mean time, I am going to keep experimenting and showing you results

Their capabilities only ever seem good when they're conducting tasks outside of the user's specific wheelhouse, no matter what their skillset may be, which suggests to me that no, they're not all that capable. And they are not worth the massive human health, energy and env. costs to play with.

They're capable enough in some domains to do superhuman feats of coding (creating new software, analyzing it, fixing bugs, modifying code) and doing machine translation tasks (like porting NES Rygar to the Atari 800). This alone will have impacts on jobs and society. So yeah, there are costs

There are very specific use cases but it's not a broad brush. But moreover putting Rygar on the 800 is something an actual coder could do and actually gain experience, understanding, expertise and have fun in the process. They can figure out what doesn't work in the translation. a data center can't.

And again more broadly you're talking about massive amounts of air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, noise concerns, energy usage problems, component costs, etc. all going up, and every time someone runs one of these programs it makes the boondoggle seem just a tad more worth it.

Kevin: have you, unlike me, ever owned or driven a car? Because if so, you might want to think about the effect your own behavior has on the environment, and how you justify it to yourself. It’s an interesting exercise, especially when you apply some hard numbers to the relative costs.

The infrastructure of the United States is irrelevant to the build out of data centers and genAI slop

But not irrelevant to the alleged immorality of Benj’s personal use—which, if he maxed out a $100/month plan for the next millennium, would not even come close to the environmental blight caused by the typical American and their car.