alt Hacker NewsGood thing the market is bigger than just you.
I've been an indie filmmaker since I was a teenager. Seedance 2.0 and all of the image and video models are such an amazing gift to use. The things you can push these models to do are incredible. I have a full VFX workbench. I can rotoscope, I can pull off effects shots. I can even use these things to articulate non-shotlist things for meetings. It's incredible. The keyboard gave everyone a "bicycle of the mind", now everyone can visually express themselves if they try.
I've professionally been a systems engineer. Five/six nines reliable services that move billions of dollars, etc. I have fallen in love with coding models. I am getting so much more work done that I'm launching easily three times what I did prior to AI tooling. The job we're all in is to provide value - these models are the next generation of compilers. We're working at higher and higher levels of abstraction, and it's brilliant. For those of us who can operate at all of the levels, it's a super power.
I will not go back to pre-AI times. I want to see what things are like in 10, 20 years. When we have at-home Michelin star robot chefs, where our cars can drive us to the beach overnight so we wake up to sunrise on the coast, where I can have an idea for a new take on a music player tagging algorithm and just build that without it consuming weeks of my time.
This is the most excited about tech I've ever been. This is so much better than smartphone incrementalism and stupid web platforms.
Stop grandpa-ing and shaking your fist at clouds. This is literally the jetpack future we were promised growing up. It's the coolest thing since the internet.
Replies
> The keyboard gave everyone a "bicycle of the mind", now everyone can visually express themselves if they try.
Right, everyone can. So now your film-making vision is simply one infinitesimally small slice of the pie that every viewer is eating. Yes, you can make a movie by yourself. Likely no one will watch it because they're too busy watching other movies made just as cheaply but by companies with marketing budgets.
> I am getting so much more work done that I'm launching easily three times what I did prior to AI tooling.
Great. Have you ever once in your life had a real conversation with a normal person where they expressed, "Man, you know what? I wish I had way more apps on my phone."
Like, yes, there is demand for software that fills unique niches, but really we are reaching saturation.
> When we have at-home Michelin star robot chefs
Eating the world's best meal, alone, while staring at your phone.
> where our cars can drive us to the beach overnight so we wake up to sunrise on the coast
This part sounds nice. Hopefully you can find parking.
> where I can have an idea for a new take on a music player tagging algorithm and just build that without it consuming weeks of my time.
Except you don't have a music player to put that algorithm in because all of the music players are closed source. You can write an open source one (or contribute to an existing one), but those all require local libraries of music, which almost no one has. Because it's not about the software, it's about the access to content.
But, really, why even bother tagging music in the first place? Just treat the tags as prompts and generate an infinite stream of music catered exactly to your mood, on demand.
I get where you're coming from. AI is a massive force multiplier for producing content. But content isn't the point of life.
The future that AI builds is one of perfect solitary meaningless hedonism. Every itch scratched, every base desire satisfied. But there is a hollow void at the center of that. Even a pet dog will lose its mind when given endless food, treats, and toys if it doesn't have an actual person to play with, and I'd like to believe we are somewhat more cognitively sophisticated than dogs.
Think back on the best meals you've ever had. I've had some very good ones. Some were memorable because of the quality of the food. But the memories of meals I hold most dear were dinners I made myself for family, not-very-good cookies my young daughter baked for me, meals shared with friends while travelling, crappy hot dogs cooked over a campfire.
It's human connection that brings us the most lasting joy, and AI is antithetical to it.
Okay, now produce something meaningfully more appealing than everyone else with the same tools - when you do that, then you have the start of a leg to stand on to claim that it’s worth the cost to everyone.
Enjoy it until the subsidies end and the economics catch up. You can afford it now with broad subsidies, but likely not the true cost.
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/24/ai-coding-a...
https://mimetiq.substack.com/p/the-tokenmaxxing-hangover
https://fortune.com/2026/05/28/tokenmaxxing-is-dead-companie...
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/ai-spending-roi-enterprise-...
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/big-techs-27-trill...
>Stop grandpa-ing and shaking your fist at clouds.
God forbid people have concerns over companies out in the open talking about replacing their jobs with AI.
Can you share something you’ve made with AI?
I’m an AI hater and the way you describe your uses sounds cool to me and like what I imagined when I was an AI optimist in the early days. The problem is that most of what it produces is still slop, the images, videos, music, and code it generates are definitely impressive but there’s something qualitatively worse about them that I can only describe as a lack of soul. Over time in a codebase, these tools create a complete mess of complexity. Those AI generated Coca Cola ads were terrible, it was just a series of cool shots with no story. The music sounds good and interesting but it’s just missing something. The writing is technically good but the voice sounds inauthentic and there’s never anything that unique or insightful in it.
I think it’ll get better though and we’ll find ways to collaborate with it that make the most of the human and AI abilities, but it seems so overhyped right now.