Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • If your choices are “reduce productivity, make money” or “increase productivity, but still make the same money”, why would you ever choose the latter?

    The thing about option 1 is that you still have “potential productivity” that you can tap into during critical times, where as in option 2, employees have already used up the “potential productivity” doing god knows what with AI, and you can’t push them more without breaking.

    by deadbabe
  • CEOs laid people off to replace them with AI, but turns out AI is more expensive and does a worse job.

    If I made a blunder of that scale, would I or would I not be put on a PIP?

    by noncoml
  • I genuinely have no idea how some of these companies got so far over their skis on AI. It simply does not make sense to me.
    by sroerick
  • > The ride-hailing company has introduced usage caps, limiting employees to $1,500 in monthly token spending on individual AI tools, after blowing through its entire AI 2026 budget by April.

    Right, because they set their 2026 budget in 2025. And in 2025 nobody could predict how good (and token-hungry) coding agents would get after November 2025.

    I'd be surprised if any company that set an AI budget for 2026 hasn't blown through it by now, assuming their staff have picked up Claude Code or Copilot or Cowork.

    by simonw
  • Companies are learning that even with mass layoffs, AI isn't worth what it costs for most use cases. This is an important inflection point because none of the AI companies are profitable, i.e. they're all still charging substantially less than what it costs to actually deliver the service. With things in that intermediate state, it's hard to know what a future stable state will be like.
    by josefritzishere
  • > Since the start of the year, Chinese AI models have overtaken their US counterparts in token consumption, according to data from OpenRouter, an aggregation platform that allows users to access multiple AI models.

    That's a bit of a dodgy statistic. OpenRouter only tracks their own users - the vast majority of API customers for OpenAI and Anthropic presumably go straight to their APIs.

    by simonw
  • We're in a dangerous valley where AI is _just_ good enough to fool some otherwise very smart people. Similar to the old adage of "a little bit of information is a dangerous thing." Lots of CEOs got duped into thinking that model capabilities were far ahead of where they actually were. I'm actually not sure if we're going to get out of the valley without figuring out a surefire way to reliably evaluate these things.
    by danielvaughn
  • I'm so frustrated by both the zealous AI bulls and the blind AI opposition.

    There's a lot of issues, ranging over technical, cultural, environmental, and moral problems. But there's also obvious value. To say otherwise tells me you haven't actually tried to make use of these tools.

    It's one thing to get an AI google response and feel like it's dubious, it's another thing to know what you want and have an LLM find the APIs for a framework you're not familiar with yet and put the pieces together. The only way I use AI for programming still involves a large amount of rejecting the responses and a massive amount of reading and validating.

    Am I able to write things faster with LLMs, yes. Am I missing out on the work involved in learning things I would be forced to otherwise, also yes. Are coworkers pushing stuff they don't understand more, surely.

    It's a mixed bag, and we need more balanced takes in the discussion around this.

    by nixpulvis

Explore Birbla archives