Comment by macmac_mac
4 hours ago
FWIW I’ve been in enough of these cycles to see the same pattern play out now with software + AI hype that I saw back in crypto land. You get:
some half-baked project that looks cool until you actually try it,
a flood of “look at me I’m first” blog posts and influencers hyping the hell out of it,
people and companies saying they’re building on it because they don’t want to be left behind,
a weird intersection with tokens/coins thrown in as an afterthought because hey, incentives, right? — and suddenly the narrative becomes “pump this thing hard”.
I mean besides crypto and ai being big investments, i barely see any parallels. AI you can actually use to build useful things in the world , and tokens are used not as trading , but transactional currency to do that building.
I did a lot of postgraduate research around crypto from 2011 - 2016. There are a lot of parallels, and your message adds to them.
"x is different because we can actually do useful stuff with it" is what every x enthusiast deep in an x bubble or pump n dump says about x.
When the next big tech bubble comes along in 10 - 15 years, there will be people saying exactly what you just said: "NextBigTech you can actually use to build useful things in the world, and NextBigTech thing actually does that building, not just what LastBigTech thing (AI) did, that obviously didn't deliver the utopia it promised".
I wonder what it'll be. AGI? Quantum computing? Brain computer interfaces?
I'd love to pickup this conversation again with you in 15 years.
A big difference between crypto and AI is around how crypto could paint a better future once we rebuilt most of our transactional infrastructure and persuaded a quorum to move onto it, and how I personally am benefiting from AI day by day to build myself tools and infrastructure for my life, work, businesses and finances only requires me to accept this change. Everyone else in the world could reject AI-augmented engineering, and I will still be tremendously better off.
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No, AI is different because we're actively doing useful stuff with it. It's not "this will replace x soon", it's "I don't x anymore because it would be crazy not to use AI for this, which is what I do on a daily basis already."
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Exactly this. Before crypto it was Big Data, before that it was Low-code platforms
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The difference is, for the claims of blockchain, it was trivially easy to look at and say, "This could have been a database".
Almost every single blockchain "product" (outside of the peer-to-peer trustless currency ) could have been a database.
This time the cost of entry of small software products has cratered.
For example, I was able to knock up a tool for a guide-maker for a niche game I play that gets about 500 peak daily players on steam.
The entire motivation for the tool is because I personally struggle to follow their well written guide. It takes a reasonable amount of focus and care to adjust a bunch of settings between "runs" based on the guide as written. Getting one of these wrong can set you back a bunch of time without even realising what went wrong.
These settings have an import/export feature in game, but that only allows for a few saved presets, and isn't easy to share.
So I've made a tool that lets people create, organise and share these presets.
Literally the only user is likely to be this single guide maker. Possibly a few others might use it to consume their guides.
Without claude-code, it would never have been reasonable for me to invest the time to make the tool. It would have been an idle dream sitting on my "I wish I had the discipline to make this" pile.
But I don't have the discipline to make that kind of project. I'm too easily distracted, and I'd have got bored of the idea before I'd finished establishing all the boilerplate, let alone before ironing out all the bugs. I also don't have the front-end talent to make things look pretty with CSS.
The LLM doesn't get demotivated. It doesn't get bored, and compressed the building of the prototype down to a day or two. Enough to keep my interest until feedback arrived. A week later, and it's shipped with 50+ issues raised and fixed.
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This generalizes to any investment bubble "this time it's different".
In those years of crypto, did you actually build anything relevant to the world? It sounds like you were in the wrong bubble and now have sour grapes.
Meanwhile im using AI coding agents to build a B2B Saas.
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This said I remember when the internet was a fad that wasn't going to stick around according to some people, so there is that.
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> and tokens are used not as trading , but transactional currency to do that building.
I think it's funny that you highlight this, because for many blockchains, their native token is the transactional currency also.
Which opens up the possibility for a marketplace around it, as well as an incentive to grift to recoup one's investment.
AFAIK there's no similar market for LLM tokens (the price may fluctuate, but the AI companies set it, and they can't be resold), but the grift works by instead selling the outputs from using the tokens.
Sure, but that’s presumes the output is something people want to buy, which presumes it is useful. Sure it can pump if useless, but the longer term dump if useless is what separates it from coins.