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The Shape of Things to Come

yegge.ai

41–50 of 88 posts

Re: The Shape of Things to Come

#41
post #36

I hear so much about people running into token limits and using bajillions of tokens. Am I doing something wrong? I'm finding it hard to run into the limits of a Claude Max (20x) account. Well, perhaps the 50% Fable limit is something I have to be aware of, but otherwise this more than I can consume. I am the limiting factor: my capability to review code and design documents. I use it to develop a large MRP-style app…

The article talks very directly about abandoning human code reviews. Couple that with a layer of AI agents whose purpose is to produce work for other AI agents, and you've got yourself a very efficient token burning feedback loop.

Re: The Shape of Things to Come

#42
post #36

I hear so much about people running into token limits and using bajillions of tokens. Am I doing something wrong? I'm finding it hard to run into the limits of a Claude Max (20x) account. Well, perhaps the 50% Fable limit is something I have to be aware of, but otherwise this more than I can consume. I am the limiting factor: my capability to review code and design documents. I use it to develop a large MRP-style app…

I'm on similar plan through work ( Teams max ), and I've only ever reached the limits by backgrounding large exploratory feasibility studies while also getting on with actual work.

From what I can tell however, true "vibe coding" gets a lot more expensive very quickly.

If you're actually just agentic engineering, then after a couple of mis-fires you'll stop, re-analyze what it is doing, what you asked for, and consider different approaches.

With pure "vibe coding", you'll keep asking it to meet your requirements as it twists and turns in the background to try to fit.

A more concrete example from a personal "game" I'm developing as a hobby:

Fable got itself in knots trying to render some fairly basic blocks on top of a wall. It understood the problem, it consistently rendered as "fins" under screenshot, and thrashed away for a good while trying to produce better looking blocks to no avail.

Eventually it stopped, and lied that it was happy with how the walls now rendered.

It took me 30 seconds in-game to realise that it was only rendering backfaces, once clued into that, the machine was able to trivially fix it without using much tokens.

But then another similar issue popped up later, hedges exhibited the same behaviour.

It would have been easy to accept the solution to render the hedges in the other order too, but I demanded a better explanation, and it turns out that it had fairly early on defined a DrawBox() method that was backward to Unity's expectations, and pushing further, it emerged this all started when I asked it to transfer what it had learned from a webGL prototype to unity.

It took things a little too literally, which is also how I ended up with an Eastward sunset at first. When I asked it to fix that, I hadn't realised that it's solution was to essentially reverse coordinates and world understanding.

Now, this stemmed from a lack of understanding or review of the 3D code, it's a vibey hobby that I'm using to learn what really goes into rendering a scene.

Had I been a professional, I would have absolutely caught that error ( and many others ).

So being professional would have helped reduce token expenditure massively, firstly by slowing down what could be done to leave time for review, but secondly and perhaps more importantly, by avoiding it getting into a state where it thrashed away for an hour trying to solve an impossible puzzle because the base assumptions were wrong.

Re: The Shape of Things to Come

#43
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It probably already is against their ToS, they just don't want to make an example out of anyone yet.

Re: The Shape of Things to Come

#44

> Now I know exactly what is going on. I know how enterprises will operate, how humans and models will interact. And I am out there building it. I want to be first. This guy's under a heavy AI psychosis

“Now I know exactly what is going on” is what Claude says right before it commits a baffling blunder.

Re: The Shape of Things to Come

#45

> 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…

I tried playing it. It's... not going to change the world of gaming.

Re: The Shape of Things to Come

#50
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…

> They were all way too long

And still are. When I got to his "Lots to cover today! Let's get to it.", I was like "wait, we haven't started yet?"

I used to read his stuff regularly prior to his Sourcegraph days, and I don't recall why I stopped. Completely agree that he was always fun to read.

So I was really disappointed to start reading this one (I'll leave the tab open, but probably won't finish it). Sounds like he's pretty out of touch with reality these days and isn't grounded at all.

Like the sibling poster, I gagged a little at his casual mention of six-figure teaching engagements, and the "suckers" (that's what "whales" read to me as well) keeping his game alive.

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