In terms of personal life, I certainly find AI tools pretty useful especially given how awful Google is now, and coding tools are indispensable at work.
I think if there's a $6T market, it will come via integrations with the products and workflows of large companies, which is obviously also happening. Apparently the tech sector as a whole is worth $5 to $10T, so it's actually not inconceivable there's $6T worth of value there (especially since the value will not be constrained to the tech sector).
> AI needs $6tn in annual revenue to justify data centre boom, Bain says
But taking those bespoke contraptions to market is not something I want to out effort into. Especially when anyone can just clone it with AI.
The AI revolution might not show up so easily in GDP.
Now are there useful applications of these tools (not gods) that might justify a sizeable new tech market? Absolutely yes! Is that market ever be going to be worth trillions a year? LOL hell no.
So where is the value? Have you built that one application you always wished existed but it wasn't available?
Yes, more than one and I use them a lot. Not being good at design and not liking front-end, among a few other things, work always stopped from from building them before,
> So you've unlocked tremendous value, but you're not earning any money?
No, I also don't make money from my coffee machine, but it provides value.
I have yet to see any truly great products made with heavily agentic coding. Correct me if I'm wrong?
The blog post is here for anyone interested: https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/p/i-spent-the-last-month...
Things are happening… and quickly, even if we are not quite to the point where VC’s are ready fund prototypes of robots to fold your laundry. Most of what’s happening is nerds finally building the project they’ve always dreamed of outside the traditional funding pathways.
To be fair the chances of the laundry folding robot is quite a bit higher then that of the hyperloop, but my point is that I believe it when I see it. And even when I see it, I will be skeptical that this AI lunacy we are in now is directly responsible for laundry folding robots, that is I think we could have laundry folding robots without those trillions of dollars of datacenter investments and training of LLMs.
One of the things that was promised in 2024 was a "deflationary spiral" for physical goods and the economy in general because of insane efficiencies that AI would supposedly bring. I believed that whole-heartedly and I was a huge AI fanboi even as my artists friends and Lib Arts friends were complaining.
We're in almost October 2026 now and they're nowhere in sight. We have a bunch of unreliable agents that do clerical and design work here and there, but where are all the industrial productivity boosts? If AI were so good, large industries and factories should be adopting them as a never-before-seen scale. Where are they?
Half a year is not a lot of time when it comes to meaningful change in directions that matter.
But go and talk to small companies. What they are able to pull off is just incredible. More features in shorter time. Improved UX and client satisfaction.
On a society level 6 months is nothing. This will take about 10 years to penetrate all organizations I assume.
And I remember times when people got angry at companies for "improving their UX" and breaking the daily routines of their users.
https://www.stripeeconomics.com/p/the-saaspocalypse-was-more...
Since Fedora moves old releases to some mirror it's a nightmare to update old installs.
Now I did it very conveniently. Did I build a space ship with the help of ChatGPT? No. Is it useful to me? Yes.
I'm doing many much cooler things that I haven't released yet but I am launching projects I never dreamed I could do as a solo dev in 2-3 months.
I'm pretty confident I can release it in October, after some 500 hours of work.
Usually in these discussions I get "so it has zero users then".
One time someone on here told me that for AI to prove its worth for software engineering, my application would need to be in use already for at least ten years.
There was a Bank of Korea study that showed AI saved workers about 1.5 hours a week, with with no increase in output. Just because I'm more productive at a task, it doesn't mean the people up or downstream of my work benefit. And my time probably gets sucked into meetings. (In the study, solo entrepreneurs did benefit--probably because they own everything end to end)
In term of cool little projects, there's all sort of things that people are doing to improve their own lives or make interesting things. No shame if you're incurious about those.
I mean, I don't know that there is some sort of AI equivalent of the lifechanging magic of rural electrictrifcation. But I don't know that it was ever likely in the near term anyway.
At home, Claude has been a god send to make it easy to learn using linux, and all sort of technologies. My personal learning curve has gone steep at an age where people start flattening out (40s).
At work, we use AI to automate 50-75% of our work. Better quality output, more productivity. I work in a bank. But the average plumber or electrician benefits too. In minutes they can become an expert into some tech they never touched before.
I thought crypto was bullshit, web 2.0 was bullshit, meta-universe was bullshit. AI is bubbly, not sure how you can justify multi-trillon valuations for companies with 80% operating margin in a competitive market where you can switch to the competitor with a drop down. But the productivity gains will be massive for the economy. I think the economy will ultimately reap the reward, not so much the labs. But I may be wrong.
I expect Open AI or Anthropic to make it through. XAI will go back to being a side hustle for SpaceX. And some open weight model will run on your own hardware or AWS. Copilot will remain a piece of trash and Gemini will be an untrusted 4th option.
https://github.com/RideControlOrg/RideControl
> Maybe it's just me, but nothing has changed in my life so far.
Manifest whatever you want!
Wouldn't have been possible.
Maybe you are not looking in the right place. Maybe your expectations are not right. Maybe the revolution isn't a super app but a mini app. Not an app with code written so beautifully it could win a Pulitzer but an app that will be used a couple of times and then discarded.
I am trying to offer an alternate viewpoint (I don't necessarily support it but I thought it was needed).
This is almost by definition not revolutionary
I'm currently using it as a basis for building a systems language with Rust's memory guarantees, but with new features like generators and co-routines, and effects instead of colored functions. The fact that the borrow checker's properties are formally proven means I can trust more of what Claude is doing than you normally would be able to do.
But hey, you can now close yourself off even more, not interact with anyone or develop a skill to get a dumb bash script for a menial task you wouldn’t miss that much anyway if you didn’t have it. Woopie, totally worth it!