Post

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

I've said it before but I think a lot of people don't grasp how much AI is used in businesses and software engineering already and I just can't see this slowing down, right or wrong.

Even the hobbyist stuff. "I used Claude to port this C64 game to a ZX81" - great, but why? When it's a human doing it, I understand it for the technical challenge it presents, the satisfaction of achieving it. But just doing it "because"? What is being accomplished here, exactly?

Because I want to play it and it would not be made otherwise. AI tools can make many previously impactical projects real

I mean, it could literally be done by learning how to code it, which also provides the journey of making something rad yourself

But do you, really, want to play it? Is that the motivation? I doubt it. Most of this stuff just seems to be created "because" and then once it's done, nobody's interested anymore, including the creator. It's just a thing that never needed to be made by someone who learnt nothing by making it.

So they can play that C64 game on a ZX81. There's always been weird ports and hobbyists projects that I've never personally understood the point of. People like to tinker. And yeah with a business if your competition is using it and their output is much faster then you could be in trouble long term.

"People like to tinker" -- exactly. People. But when it's just Claude doing all the work, where is the tinkering? I'm with you, weird hobbyist ports are incredible. When it's the result of someone tinkering because they could, and had the smarts to do it. Claude stuff? Just leaves me cold.