Rolling your own Linux is nearly free and could be done on any computer you had lying around. Dropping >$5k on a computer to run a local model (badly) doesn't really scratch my "hacker" itch. The author of this article works for an AI infrastructure company and ran Kimi K3 on their infrastructure - this post reads like marketing.
The inflation-adjusted cost for getting one of the early personal computers to do some BASIC programming was probably a lot higher than $5k today, and you could still go cheaper. Local AI is still (expensive) hobby territory. A capable local AI machine runs for about as much as a good mountainbike.
You can run a small model on almost any hardware, for free, and just play around. It doesn’t need to be some “frontier” (whatever the hell that means) model by any means. Grab some new tech and slap it on whatever hardware you have laying around, see what you think.
Making it about the hardware costs is not the play, they’re not an actual barrier.
I don't want to use a crappy model that can't do any of the things I want it to.
I'm not coding with Claude cause I enjoy the inherent novelty of LLMs. I'm doing it cause it's enabling me to quickly solve problems without getting stuck on the hitches that have deterred me from bothering with dozens of side projects my entire life.
Sure, that's fine. But some people like to play around and hack just for the sake of hacking. If you don't like that, that's cool, no issue with that. But some people do.
(FWIW, I have the same attitude/preference as you do. Until I can run SOTA models on my own hardware without taking out a second mortgage, I'll pay our AI overlords for the privilege.)
> For minimum requirements, the new target is 1080p at 30 FPS using the Fast preset. This means a 64-bit system, 8 GB of RAM with a discrete GPU or 12 GB with integrated graphics, a 4-core processor, and a Vulkan 1.3 capable GPU with at least 2 GB of VRAM.
> For recommended requirements, the new target is 1080p at 60 FPS using the Fancy preset. This includes 16 GB of RAM, a stronger modern processor, and a more capable graphics card with 6 GB of VRAM.
This blog post also implies that the requirements bump is due to numerous changes to Minecraft over the years, not just the change to Vulkan.
> If you already play Java Edition without issues, you may not notice anything changing right away. If your game often struggles, the new requirements may help explain why and give you a clearer target for a smoother experience.
> [...] and give you a clearer target for a smoother experience.
Actually, this means you're better running and older version. Is not that Minecraft makes huge improvements with each release. IMHO not enough to justify 16GB of RAM and a GPU with at least 6GB of VRAM.
Especially these days with memory being so expensive.
I agree this type of web design sucks. It's been common for more than a decade - I remember Apple getting criticized for using this on the product page for the old "trash can" Mac Pro in 2013, and it was already widely used back then.
However, it seems pretty clear to me they did this in service of a joke - you have to "crank" your scroll wheel to get to the content, just like you have to crank this device. I think it's funny...
> Anthropic's own scaffold is described in their technical post: launch a container, prompt the model to scan files, let it hypothesize and test, use ASan as a crash oracle, rank files by attack surface, run validation. That is very close to the kind of system we and others in the field have built, and we've demonstrated it with multiple model families, achieving our best results with models that are not Anthropic's. The value lies in the targeting, the iterative deepening, the validation, the triage, the maintainer trust. The public evidence so far does not suggest that these workflows must be coupled to one specific frontier model.
The argument in the article is that the framework to run and analyze the software being tested is doing most of the work in Anthropic's experiment, and that you can get similar results from other models when used in the same way.
This happens to everyone's fingers to some extent because the fingertips dry out as you age. It's a huge source of frustration for elderly folks since it adds to the confusion around using touch interfaces. My family members have had some success moistening their fingers with a wet paper towel periodically as they use their devices, though of course that is impractical on the go.
I've seen engineers I respect abandon this way of working as a team for the productivity promise of conjuring PRs with a coding agent. It blows away years of trust so quickly when you realize they stopped reviewing their own output.
Perhaps due to FOMO outbreak[1], upper management everywhere has demanded AI-powered productivity gains, based on LoC/PR metrics, it looks like they are getting it.
1. The longer I work in this industry, the more it becomes clear that CxO's aren't great at projecting/planning, and default to copy-cat, herd behaviors when uncertain.
Would love to be a fly on the wall for a couple of months to see what corporate CxO's actually do.
Surely I could do a mediocre job as a CxO by parroting whatever is hot on Linkedin. Probably wouldn't be a massively successful one, but good enough to survive 2 years and have millions in the bank for that, or get fired and get a golden parachute.
(half) joking - most likely I'm massively trivializing the role.
Funny enough, the author of this blog post wrote another one on exactly that topic, entitled "What do executives do, anyway?"[1]. If you read it, you'll find it's written from quite an interesting perspective, not quite "fly on the wall," but perhaps as close as you're going to get in a realistic scenario.
"Surely I could do a mediocre job as a CxO by parroting whatever is hot on Linkedin"
Having worked for a pretty decent CIO of a global business I'd say his main job was to travel about speak to other senior leaders and work out what business problems they had and try and work out, at a very high level, how technology would fit into that addressing those problems.
Just parroting latest technology trends would, I suspect, get you sacked within a few weeks.
A charitable explanation for what CxOs do is that they figure out their strategic goals and then focus really hard on ways to herd cats en masse to achieve the goals in an efficient manner. Some people end up doing a great job, some do so accidentally, other just end up doing a job. Sometimes parroting some linkadink drivel is enough to keep the ship on course - usually because the winds are blowing in the right direction or the people at the oars are working well enough on their own.
Software engineers are pushed to their limits (and beyond). Unrealistic expectations are established by Twitter "I shipped an Uber clone in 2 hours with Claude" forcing every developer to crank out PRs, managers are on the look out for any kind of perceived inefficiency in tools like GetDX and Span.
If devs are expected to ship 10x faster (or else!), then they will find a way to ship 10x faster.
I always found it weird how most management would do almost anything other than ask their dev team "hey, is there any way to make you guys more productive?"
Ive had metrics rammed down my throat, Ive had AI rammed down my throat, Scrum rammed down my throad and Ive had various other diktats rammed down my throat.
95% of which slowed us down.
The only time ive been asked is when there is a deadline and it's pretty clear we arent going to hit it and even then they're interested in quick wins like "can we bring lunch to you for a few weeks?", not systemic changes.
The fastest and most productive times have been when management just set high level goals and stopped prodding.
Im convinced that the companies which seek developer autonomy will leave the ones which seek to maximize token usage in the dust in the next tech race.
In my experience what you’ve described as the ideal setting for Eng work does lead to a very high quality product. The problem then is understanding if the market you’re in values high quality over speed or familiarity. All markets claim to value quality, many markets don’t.
Putting too much trust in an agent is definitely a problem, but I have to admit I've written about a dozen little apps in the past year without bothering to look at the code and they've all worked really well. They're all just toys and utilities I've needed and I've not put them into a production system, but I would if I had to.
Agents are getting really good, and if you're used to planning and designing up front you can get a ton of value from them. The main problem with them that I see today is people having that level of trust without giving the agent the context necessary to do a good job. Accepting a zero-shotted service to do something important into your production codebase is still a step too far, but it's an increasingly small step.
>> Putting too much trust in an agent is definitely a problem, but I have to admit I've written about a dozen little apps in the past year without bothering to look at the code and they've all worked really well. They're all just toys and utilities I've needed and I've not put them into a production system, but I would if I had to.
I have been doing this to, and I've forgotten half of them. For me the point is that this usage scenario is really good, but it also has no added value to it, really. The moment Claude Code raises it prices 2x this won't be viable anymore, and at the same time to scale this to enterprise software production levels you need to spend on an agent probably as much as hiring two SWEs, given that you need at least one to coordinate the agents.
Deepseek v3.2 tokens are $0.26/0.38 on OpenRouter. That model - released 4 months ago - isn't really good enough by today's standards, but its significantly stronger than Opus 4.1, which was only released last August! In 12 months I think its reasonable to expect there will be a model with less cost than that which is significantly stronger than anything available now.
And no, it isn't ONLY because VC capital is being burned to subsidize cost. That is impossible for the dozen smaller providers offering service at that cost on OpenRouter who have to compete with each other for every request and also have to pay compute bills.
Qwen3.5-9B is stronger than GPT-4o and it runs on my laptop. That isn't just benchmarks either. Models are getting smaller, cheaper and better at the same time and this is going to continue.
I think Claude could raise it's prices 100x and people would still use it. It'd just shift to being an enterprise-only option and companies would actually start to measure the value instead of being "Whee, AI is awesome! We're definitely going really fast now!"
100x? You think people would pay $20k per month for Claude Code?
Codex is as good (or very nearly) as Claude code. Open source models continue to improve. The open source harnesses will also continue to improve. Anthropic is good, but it has no moat. No way could they 100x their prices.
I’m so disappointed to see the slip in quality by colleagues I think are better than that. People who used to post great PRs are now posting stuff with random unrelated changes, little structs and helpers all over the place that we already have in common modules etc :’(
At first glance this looks like it might be the halting problem in disguise (instead of the general function of the logic, just ask if they both have logic that halts or doesn't halt). I think we would need to allow for false negatives to even be theoretically possible, so while identical text comparison would be easy enough, anything past that can quickly becomes complicated and you can probably infinitely expand the complexity by handling more and more edge cases (but never every edge case due to the underlying halting problem/undecidability of code).
Unless you're suggesting the toy company secretly rigs the magic 8 ball to never recommend nuclear war, I'll take my chances with the organizational changes.
It's easy to fall into a negative mindset when there are legions of pointy haired bosses and bandwagoning CEOs who (wrongly) point at breakthroughs like this as justification for AI mandates or layoffs.
It's easy to fall into a negative mindset because the justification is real and what we see is just the beginning.
Obviously we are not at a point where developers aren't needed. But One developer can do more. And that is a legitimate reason to higher less developers.
The impending reality of the upward moving trendline is that AI becomes so capable that it can replace the majority of developers. That future is so horrifying that people need to scaffold logic to unjustifiy it.
The "pointy-haired boss" was a character in the Dilbert comics, an archetypical know-nothing manager who spews jargon, jumps on trends, and takes credit for ideas that aren't his.
Crazy that an honest question like this gets downvoted.
I honestly think the downvote button is pretty trash for online communities. It kills diversity of thought and discussion and leaves you with an echo chamber.
If you disagree with or dislike something, leave a response. Express your view. Save the downvotes for racism, calls for violence, etc.
Downvotes eventually turn all online communities into echo chambers, definitely. It is only a matter of time for HN, and you can see it accelerating in the past 1-2 years (though mostly on AI stuff, and mostly in downvote behaviour - it still remains surprisingly resilient overall).
I feel like the only upside of the downvote is to act as sort of a mob moderation system, allowing offensive comments to naturally sink to the bottom.
Maybe in the future, platforms can have high quality auto moderation using AI to read every post and delete/flag those not following community guidelines.
I’m sure this would work well today, though not sure about the cost.
Yes, all of these stories, and frequent model releases are just intended to psyop "decision makers" into validating their longstanding belief that the labour shouldn't be as big of a line item in a companies expenses, and perhaps can be removed altogether.. They can finally go back to the good old days of having slaves (in the form of "agentic" bots), they yearn to own slaves again.
CEOs/decision makers would rather give all their labour budget to tokens if they could just to validate this belief. They are bitter that anyone from a lower class could hold any bargaining chips, and thus any influence over them. It has nothing to do with saving money, they would gladly pay the exact same engineering budget to Anthropic for tokens (just like the ruling class in times past would gladly pay for slaves) if it can patch that bitterness they have for the working class's influence over them.
The inference companies (who are also from this same class of people) know this, and are exploiting this desire. They know if they create the idea that AI progress is at an unstoppable velocity decision makers will begin handing them their engineering budgets. These things don't even have to work well, they just need to be perceived as effective, or soon to be for decision makers to start laying people off.
I suspect this is going to backfire on them in one of two ways.
1. French Revolution V2, they all get their heads cutoff in 15 years, or an early retirement on a concrete floor.
2. Many decisions makers will make fools of themselves, destroy their businesses and come begging to the working class for our labor, giving the working class more bargaining chips in the process.
Either outcome is going to be painful for everyone, lets hope people wake up before we push this dumb experiment too far.
I’m reminded of Dan Wang’s commentary on US-China relations:
> Competition will be dynamic because people have agency. The country that is ahead at any given moment will commit mistakes driven by overconfidence, while the country that is behind will feel the crack of the whip to reform. … That drive will mean that competition will go on for years and decades.
The future is not predetermined by trends today. So it’s entirely possible that the dinosaur companies of today can’t figure out how to automate effectively, but get outcompeted by a nimble team of engineers using these tools tomorrow. As a concrete example, a lot of SaaS companies like Salesforce are at risk of this.
I think it will be over automation that does them in, most normies I know are not down with this all this automation and will totally opt for the human focused product experienced, not the one devoid of it because it was built and ran by a souless NN powered autocomplete. We certainly aren't going to let a bunch of autocomplete models (sold to us as intelligent agents), replace our labor. We aren't stupid.
Much like there is a premium for handmade clothing, and from scratch food. Automation does nothing but lower the value of your product (unless its absolutely required like electronics perhaps), when there is an alternative, the one made with human input/intention is always worth more.
And the idea that small nimble teams are going to outpace larger corporations is such a psyop. You really mostly hear CEOs saying these things on podcast. This is to appease the working class, to give them hope that they too one day can be a billionaire...
Also, the vast majority of people who occupy computer i/o focused jobs, whos jobs will be replaced, need to work to eat and they don't all want to go form nimble automated SaaS companies lmao, this is such a farce.. Bad things to come all around.
The question is to what extent there is a market for more stuff. If the cost of making software drops 10x we can still make 10x the software. There are projects which wouldn’t be done before that can now be done.
I know with respect to personal projects more projects are getting “funded” with my time. I’m able to get done in a couple of hours with coding agents what would’ve taken me a couple of weekends to finish if I stayed motivated to. The upshot is I’m able get much closer to “done” than before.
I sing tenor in a university choir as an older male community member and we encourage anyone to sing tenor whose voice is low enough. Over 1/3 of our tenors are women and our voices blend very well IMO.
The Fremen followed a messianic figure into a galaxy-wide holy war because the Bene Gesserit seeded their culture with manufactured prophecy as a failsafe.
Just woke up after 80 years of abuse by Landsraad/CHOAM, possibly centuries of persecution before that, at least decades of religious conditioning by Bene Gesserit, and decided to “follow” messianic figure.
Totally same point as humans using LLMs to smoothen their brain.
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