The Shape of Things to Come • Hacker News Board

Re: The Shape of Things to Come

#21

Post by tclancy » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 10:23 AM UTC

bambax wrote: post #7

I used to like Steve's posts. They were all way too long, but a fun and interesting read nonetheless. He started to lose me when at Sourcegraph where he oversell Cody which didn't do anything useful (I even had a commercial meeting with Sourcegraph people who weren't of much help); then he completely lost me with his GasTown business where AI meets crypto (what could possibly go wrong with that). Now I can't read any…

It is a rough go for a long-time reader, the bragging tone of six figure engagements and “whales” (i.e., suckers) keeping the game going. The statement that what he is doing is what the reader will soon catch up to feels like someone who can no longer see land.

That said, as another nut with an agent factory toiling away around me, I’ve also started to think about replacing any kind of CI in the cloud with local. I couldn’t quite keep myself at the article to read what comes next, so I guess I will catch up to it down the road.

Re: The Shape of Things to Come

#22

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 10:29 AM UTC

pringk02 wrote: post #14

> But my Wyvern development has been burning the equivalent of $87k/month of API token burn, or about 69 billion tokens in July (96% cache hits, fortunately). So I do have to worry about it. I don't care how much money you have; your spouse is not going to let you spend almost ninety thousand dollars a month on your hobby game. I didn't even bother asking. > My solution has been to create a token tap on $200 Max acco…

[deleted]

Re: The Shape of Things to Come

#23

Post by drdrek » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 10:33 AM UTC

Essays became way to easy to write with AI. It used to be a basic filter that if text was long the author put a lot of thought (even if misguided) and effort (even if low quality) into it.

Not its just another torrent of words.

We need proof of work on long texts, a service that guarantees that the author was whipped for more than 20 lashes for this text to exists and thus we know he cared enough to publish it.

Re: The Shape of Things to Come

#24

Post by furyofantares » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 10:35 AM UTC

drdrek wrote: post #23

Essays became way to easy to write with AI. It used to be a basic filter that if text was long the author put a lot of thought (even if misguided) and effort (even if low quality) into it. Not its just another torrent of words. We need proof of work on long texts, a service that guarantees that the author was whipped for more than 20 lashes for this text to exists and thus we know he cared enough to publish it.

yegge has been famously writing ultra long blog posts for decades now

Re: The Shape of Things to Come

#25

Post by georgemcbay » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 10:40 AM UTC

mad0 wrote: post #15

pringk02 wrote: post #14

> But my Wyvern development has been burning the equivalent of $87k/month of API token burn, or about 69 billion tokens in July (96% cache hits, fortunately). So I do have to worry about it. I don't care how much money you have; your spouse is not going to let you spend almost ninety thousand dollars a month on your hobby game. I didn't even bother asking. > My solution has been to create a token tap on $200 Max acco…

> Once you're hooked on Wyvern, you're hooked for life. I have whales that have spent thousands on it. At minimum 4k (given by whales = min 2 whales, thousands = min 2 thosands :) ) So I'm guessing that this covers Claud accounts. edit: taking a look at https://yegge.ai/wyvern - probably outdated - the revenue is at 5k.

> the revenue is at 5k.

"$5K a month, at the peak, from a single devoted “whale”"

So it doesn't tell us his monthly revenue ('at the peak' doing some heavy lifting), nor necessarily the total revenue, but I guess it tells us he has made at least $5k from it overall...

...earned from a single player he charmingly referred to as a "whale" (which, yes, I know is what they are commonly called in the mobile game industry but like, usually not to their faces).

But in any case, from Yegge's OP post:

> On the side I do occasional six-figure gigs where I fly to companies and teach them my techniques

Seems like being an AI Spiritual Leader pays well enough to keep him in tokens, at least until when/if a critical mass of people start adopting his system of stacking Claude subscriptions, in which case I imagine Anthropic will make that against their ToS.

Re: The Shape of Things to Come

#26

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 10:51 AM UTC

xnorswap wrote: post #3

I don't like using the term "AI psychosis" because it originally meant a narrow definition resulting in genuine psychosis and acute mental health trauma, but seems to have widened to anyone falling down a much wider trapdoor of AI engagement. But I read, or at least attempt to read, something like this, and I can't help but marvel at the capture that AI agents seem to have on some individuals. I expected Yegge to, at…

[deleted]

Re: The Shape of Things to Come

#27

Post by endymion-light » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 10:58 AM UTC

This post made me write manual code, there's something about hearing the description of this that makes me worry the bubble is going to come home to roost.

The obvious danger of spending so much on inference and creating ever expanding complexities feels like the height of crypto psychosis

If this harness was achieving major mathematical proofs or creating really consequential work, I think I'd feel differently - but I'm unclear based off of this article what this achieves that a typical harness couldnt

Re: The Shape of Things to Come

#28

Post by rubzah » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 11:04 AM UTC

I smell an architecture astronaut getting high on abstractions. Taken far enough, it starts to look like psychedelic ramblings of a manic schizophrenic losing grip on reality.

Interestingly, the author actually has a product, something usually missing in claims of the new LLM powered productivity nirvana. Hopefully, with time, there will be a way to verify the effectiveness of all of this fire and fury, measured in actual worthwhile deliveries of this product.

Re: The Shape of Things to Come

#29

Post by sdoering » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 11:04 AM UTC

tosh wrote: post #5

nb: current models (e.g. GPT 5.6 Sol) are very good at long horizon tasks they no longer need crutches or rube goldberg machines to keep them going minimal agent harness is just a loop that loops until no more tool calls are coming GPT 5.6 Sol continues to drive the loop until the task is done or it decides that it wants to present the user with information at that point it is probably good to not automatically conti…

In my daily work, I found expeciall terra and sol now stopping every few rounds again, telling me the tak is done. I even had them create a detailled plan - and told them to finish "end to end" - and they appruptly stop after the plan. Because they interpret this as finished. Even if the DOD is clearly not "finish the plan".

The new models are shite (pardon my French), when it comes to long running tasks and I find myself more and more using open wheights models or switching back to gpt-5.5 for "real work".

This might be the fact, that i use them for non coding work. But the degradation between 5.5 and 5.6 is stark in my daily work.

As always with AI - everybody's mileage will vary.

Re: The Shape of Things to Come

#30

Post by coffeebeqn » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 11:09 AM UTC

drdrek wrote: post #23

Essays became way to easy to write with AI. It used to be a basic filter that if text was long the author put a lot of thought (even if misguided) and effort (even if low quality) into it. Not its just another torrent of words. We need proof of work on long texts, a service that guarantees that the author was whipped for more than 20 lashes for this text to exists and thus we know he cared enough to publish it.

Writing short posts is the new test