alt Hacker NewsEveryone is really tightening usage now because of all the slopmaxers who burned millions of dollars of tokens and achieved nothing.
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Interesting angle to blame the slopmaxers when the AI companies have been pushing maximum usage for a while now.
I assume they’d hoped that the value of the spend would manifest itself and they could raise prices. The opposite happened and companies are instead cutting back.
It sounds to me like they chose a poor marketing and pricing strategy for a product that is very difficult to make cost effective.
Everyone trying to vibecode their next million dollar idea only discover the web is dead. Nobody is looking for anything because that would require leaving the safety of the same handful of sites everyone else is on.
What did they think was going to happen? Lots of people predicted exactly this progression of events.
It may have something to do with the summer intern season ending. I know one of the interns hired by my employer used up the allotted AI spend by doing “fun” things unrelated to the internship project, like making Claude write an entire SQL-to-Pandas transpiler in 10,000 lines of Python. I can’t blame them for using it extensively when given access to a generous limit on token usage.
When was the last time anyone used the term "tokenmaxxing" right now?
Exactly, No-one and as predicted it was a fad. [0]
We are seeing the result of those subsidizations and discounts that Anthropic made this year and how much of this "tokenmaxxing" hype was used to make their revenue numbers look "good".
With the arrival of more cheaper models which are good enough, it doesn't make much sense to use Anthropic's models.
So don't be easily fooled by their revenue projections. Rather question if it is sustainable for them. (Spoiler, it isn't)
Lmao a colleague who works elsewhere said some goon at work created an AI leaderboard. He spun up research agents. Top of board achieved. Granted the guys a very solid developer, but he did it to prove how dumb this is.
AI put a massive spotlight on all the required but unspoken decision making and coordination that must occur with stakeholders outside their own teams during the development process.
Dysfunctional middle management has always traditionally neglected it or actively undermined it, blaming others when things go wrong and taking credit when things go right.
Naive developers are always more than happy to do what they think is "picking up the slack" not realizing it's a trap.
Perhaps most organizations are just now more wise to the fact that using AI to "accelerate the process" is like arming the monkeys with machine guns?
Slop is a side effect for anyone using it at scale it seems.
I now think of software code as DNA.
Your machinery was not written elegantly. It was sloppily assembled via evolutionary pressures.
A gene gets duplicated, mutates, and suddenly you have new functionality and new fitness criteria.
Try something bad and you die without reproduction.
Our code isn't clean. There's redundancy and extra packing and slop all over the human body.
Embrace it. Stochastically hill climb.
Code is DNA. Evolve it, don't intelligently design it. Fit the curves of your environment quickly and use tests to cull bad behavior and the slopes of your domain.
People tend to do wonderfully at whatever metric they're judged by. I don't think the "tokens consumed" metric was a very good one.