[blindhippo]

If anything, the AI bubble is reinforcing to me (and hopefully many more people) that the "markets" are anything but rational. None of the investments going on have followed any semblance of fundamentals - it's all pure instinct and chasing hype. I just hope it doesn't tear down the world for the 99% of us unable to actually reap any benefits from it.

AI is basically a toy for 99% of us. It's a long long ways away from the productivity boost people love to claim to justify the sky high valuations. It will fade to being a background tech employed strategically I suspect - similar to other machine learning applications and this is exactly where it belongs.

I'm forced to use it (literally, AI usage is now used as a talent review metric...) and frankly, it's maybe helped speed me up... 5-10%? I spend more time trying to get the tools to be useful than I would just doing the task myself. The only true benefit I've gotten has been unit test generation. Ask it to do any meaningful work on a mature code base and you're in for a wild ride. So there's my anecdotal "sentiment".

[dionian]

I multi task much more now that i can farm off small coding assignments to agents. i pay hndreds per month in tokens. for my role personally its been a massive paradigm shift.

[blindhippo]

Might work for you, but if I multi task too much, the quality of my output drops significantly. Where I work, that does not fly. I cannot trust any agent to handle anything without babysitting them to avoid going off the rails - but perhaps the tools I have access to just aren't good (underlying model is claude 4.5, so it the model isn't the cause).

I've said this in the past and I'll continue to say it - until the tools get far better at managing context, they will be hard locked for value in most use cases. The moment I see "summarizing conversation" I know I'm about to waste 20 minutes fixing code.

[cmiles8]

There are absolutely folks like you out there and I don’t doubt the productivity increase. The challenge is you are not the norm and the hundreds per month from you and others like you are a drop in the bucket of what’s needed to pay for all this.

[WhyOhWhyQ]

To each his own, but multi-tasking feels bad to me. I want to spend my life pursuing mastery of a craft, not lazily delegating. Not that everyone should have the same goals, but the mastery route feels like it's dying off. It makes me sad.

I get it that some people just want to see the thing on the screen. Or your priority is to be a high status person with a loving family etc.. etc... All noble goals. I just don't feel a sense of fulfillment from a life not in pursuit of something deeper. The AI can do it better than me, but I don't really care at the end of the day. Maybe super-corp wants the AI to do it then, but it's a shame.

[re-thc]

> the "markets" are anything but rational

No, they are rational. At least those with a lot of money.

> None of the investments going on have followed any semblance of fundamentals - it's all pure instinct and chasing hype

That's not what investments are about. Their fundamentals are if they can get a good return on their money. As long as the odds of the next sucker to buy them up exists it is a good investment.

> AI is basically a toy for 99% of us.

You do pay for toys right? Toy shops aren't irrational?

[fragmede]

> AI is basically a toy for 99% of us.

So you're at the "first they laugh at us" stage then.

[AnimalMuppet]

OK, but not everything that gets to that stage moves on to the next, let alone the stage after that.

But I will give you this, the "first they ignore us" stage is over, at least for many people.