how do people come up with game ideas? i’ve had plenty of app ideas in my life but never a game idea. what are the building blocks? do you start with the full picture? or like some satisfying mechanics that you scale up?

yesterday i signed up again for claude max $200 plan and had it change the whole visual metaphor of the productivity app i’ve been working on intermittently over the past year: instead of a traditional UI with tables, lists, tools, etc, i told Fable to use a desktop OS metaphor instead for displaying the various built-in mini apps (tasks, chat, notes, etc). all with a functioning dock and animated wallpaper and multiple window support etc. fable was able to solve the problem but really i’m beyond the point of being impressed by an LLM doing some upfront task. everything worked, it “made no mistakes”, all tests passed (it even fixed old tests), but i was like ok whatever thanks. i blew past my $200 limit in 2 hours. and now i’m sitting here like, ok, now what? do i ship this? hear me be a whiny bitch for a second: that it was too easy killed the whole part of the journey of making an app where you become a new person through the creation process, and you earn such pride in your work which in the past gave you the energy and courage to ship things. and i’m like, i can ship this. i can try to make a buck. the app is done. but i just don’t feel a bond with the work. now if you were a somewhat savvy operator, the business type that would happily sell refrigerator coolant if you sensed an opportunity, AI will be a godsend for you. but i don’t wanna sell refrigerator coolant. and now because everything is so easy, i hardly ever feel like i’m solving a real problem anymore. it’s like how deep of a problem am i really solving if someone can one shot my app in 2 hours? i will say that in those 2 hours yesterday, i really enjoyed being back near the code. there’s nothing funner than making shit. it’s just that the new way of doing things kills a lot of the creative and spiritual juices you used to get before, that many times lead to commercially beneficial outcomes. now, i just don’t know what’s worth building anymore.

what happened to AI democratizing software development? what happened to the price of technology going down not up over time? what happened to LLMs tending towards commoditization? why does anthropic have the industry in a chokehold? where the fuck are openai and google? will the free market sort this out? or? too much power. anthropic has too much power.

I must say OpenAI’s writing is very stagnant and boring. I feel the AGI much more when I read Anthropic.

Rich people who were too stupid to code before are now superstars. And actually brilliant engineers are made to feel stupid and redundant. Meanwhile coding has been synthesized into beige gooey calorie dense bars made from cockroaches and engineers have to line up with a small plate begging for their share from the token barons who, fortunately, at any given moment can feel generous enough to press a button that makes the tokens fly out like projectile vomit. Engineers at these companies, who sit mere inches from the spigot, frequently bless us with thinkpieces that we too should be doing what they do, and it’s actually quite unfashionable not to do so. Of course none of this is so much engineering advice as it is financial advice. But sure, “wHy dO pEoPle hATe Ai?”

Really sad to see an aging materialist who helped birth this technology conceiving of one final attempt to give meaning to his life.

Once the bubble pops, Anthropic and OpenAI will become the Coinbase and Block of the AI world. Mundane companies that ship narrative wrappers on mundane bytes. That the bubble will pop isn’t some apocalyptic doomsday prophecy. It’s not that complicated: AI is freakishly expensive to serve. If the returns on the other end are not justified, the bubble pops. And thus begins the decades long buildout to actually economically justifiable AI. It’s amusing how resistant reality is to our fictions and fantasies. In the peak of the crypto bubble we thought reality was going to be transformed into financial liberty and democratization for all, and network states and decentralized reserve currencies. Coinbase stood to be a multi-trillion dollar company and is now just a mundane tech startup. Today we spin similar narratives about the intellectual upheaval of AI, about the new democratization of intelligence and how everything will soon begin to orbit this new technology. At the end, Anthropic and OpenAI will be mundane IT providers with an insanely grim research outlook to make AI economically sensible and useful, no different from Google’s position in trying to make quantum commercially viable. Reality is, fortunately, pretty hardened against our delusions.

Sam Altman is starting to panic

This may be the best synthesis I’ve heard of the entire AI situation, from Palantir CEO: “There’s a myriad of problems these models solve, and an even bigger amount of problems they create.”

Anthropic is questioning whether AI may turn out to be altogether useless. This is the single most honest thing Anthropic has ever written. “But achieving recursive improvement alone does not suggest an immediate change in how industrial production occurs, societies organize, or markets function. More intelligence can’t learn what a drug does over decades of use, can’t hold elections sooner than a constitution dictates, and can’t turn a stranger into an old friend in a weekend. For most people, the felt pace of this future will still be set by the bottlenecks, even if the laboratory upstream runs at the speed of compute. That collision, where recursive intelligence building itself ever faster meets the world of humans, relationships, and governance, is another part of this future we can’t predict.”

It’s hunger. Simple as that. Past 30 you’ve settled down, you’ve made a little money, proven yourself. In your 20s there is an existential urgency to justify your own existence.

The basis of all scientific discovery is search from a point of view.

not feeling the AGI