Seriously, what value are tokens providing other than justifying layoffs. Concretely. Today. Not in the speculating scenario that cardiologist could be replaced with models.
We see this new trend of agentic coding, again a promise software will be written that way going forward, despite the number of fiasco already experienced when trusting a model turned bad. The use case may provide value, but right now all it does is fullfil the push for token consumption all these AI leaders are advocating for.
Like the OP said, it's incredible how polarizing this debate is. When I read comments like yours, I feel like a significant part of the global workforce in IT must be living on another planet? Or they never really used Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, ... intensively before because of company policies?
I legitimately am at least 10x more productive than a year ago, and I can prove it in number of commits and finished monetizable features developed per day. Obviously my workflows still very much require an active, constantly context-switching human-in-the-loop, but to me there's absolutely no question both output volume & quality have skyrocketed.
That claim is totally worthless without you providing concrete information how you measured that.
Value add so far lacks evidence.
Layoffs. It justifies them to the public. I'm not certain it grants them as it contradicts a principle of enterprise: scale, as much as you possibly can.
If tokens provided value today, we would be hiring more engineers to review their output and put things together.
That number is at least tenfold of what it was before, simply because I can run a lot of gruntwork in parallel now without wasting brainpower and focus on that stuff.
There are millions of other wanna be engineers doing exactly the same, assuming demand will scale as much as the offer.
What returns are you getting on those?
Let me create 500 websites, deployed for free, I hand that over to you by end of day. Will you give me a cent per piece? If so, happy to do business with you.
there is an even larger force on HN that financially _needs_ the value of tokens to be inflated (so much so that bots have overwhelmed the site)
All that said the dotcom boom is extremely analogous and that crash was quite bad.
Claude helped me implement a ridiculous amount of features in my programming language. It's helped me migrate the heap to an easily moveable index-based object space. It's helped me implement generators. It's helped me implement a new memory allocator. It's helped me fix a ridiculous amounts of bugs and make a huge number of small improvements everywhere. Its ability to provide me repository wide code review was a game changer for a solo developer like me. And it's doing so much more than that. I got more things done in the past few weeks than previous months even though I'm evaluating, learning, understanding and rewriting the AI output.
It's actually addictive to build things with Claude. The usage limits are starting to make me anxious, just like withdrawal syndrome. I applied for their open source max subscription program even though I'm too small for it because who knows, I might get in anyway and it costs nothing.
AI is quite literally a world changing technology. I hope the open models keep steadily progressing and that hardware remains available to all so we can run our own models on our own computers one day.
Just far cheaper (if you are in USA) and probably more useful in terms of job prospects.
Agentic coding absolutely blew up from demand, users are not being tricked into paying $200 a month, and they’re not complaining about hitting rate limits because it’s useless.
users are not being tricked into paying $200 a month
This belief is so common amongst AI collapse people online. I'm guessing these people have only used free ChatGPT or worse, they use Windows and get Copilot shoved down their throats?
Meanwhile, I'm flying around with a $20 Codex subscription doing everything from writing code, analyzing stocks, coming up with ideas, etc.
IMO if someone tried this tech last time 6 months ago, or their only exposure is eg. via MS copilot, they do have a rational reason for skepticism. No technology of this complexity has improved this rapidly in my memory (well, ok, we had the CPU speed races from 90's to early 2000's).
It's adding tests for me and doing medium complexity refactors that I'd otherwise have to spend hours on
And based on reality (code) rather than my feelz of what I vaguely remember the code to have been doing in some long past.
Coding, writing, summarizing, translating, data analysis, customer support, test generation.