There was a land rush to create apps. Basic stuff like the flash light, todo lists, etc, were created and found a huge audience. Development studios were established, people became very successful out of it.

I think the same thing will happen here. There is a first mover advantage. The future is not yet evenly distributed.

You can still start as an iOS developer today, but the opportunity is different.

The introduction of the App Store did not increase developer productivity per se. If anything, it decreased developer productivity, because unless you were already already a Mac developer, you had to learn a programming language you've never used, Objective-C, (now it's largely Swift, but that's still mainly used only on Apple platforms) and a brand new Apple-specific API, so a lot of your previous programming expertise became obsolete on a new platform. What the App Store did that was valuable to developers was open up a new market and bring a bunch of new potential customers, iPhone users, indeed relatively wealthy customers willing to spend money on software.

What new market is brought by LLMs? They can produce as much source code as you like, but how exactly do you monetize that massive amount of source code? If anything, the value of source code and software products will drop as more is able to be produced rapidly.

The only new market I see is actually the developer tool market for LLM fans, essentially a circular market of LLM developers marketing to other LLM developers.

As far as the developer job market is concerned, it's painfully clear that companies are in a mass layoff mood. Whether that's due to LLMs, or whether LLMs are just the cover story, the result is the same. Developer compensation is not on the rise, unless you happen to be recruited by one of the LLM vendors themselves.

My impression is that from the developer perspective, LLMs are a scheme to transfer massive amounts of wealth from developers to the LLM vendors. And you can bet the prices for access to LLMs will go up, up, up over time as developers become hooked and demand increases. To me, the whole "OpenClaw" hype looks like a crowd of gamblers at a casino, putting coins in slot machines. One thing is for certain: the house always wins.

I think it will make prototyping and MVP more accessible to a wider range of people than before. This goes all the way from people who don't know how to code up to people who know very well how to code, but don't have the free time/energy to pursue every idea.

Project activation energy decreases. I think this is a net positive, as it allows more and different things to be started. I'm sure some think it's a net negative for the same reasons. If you're a developer selling the same knowledge and capacity you sold ten years ago things will change. But that was always the case.

My comparison to iOS was about the market opportunity, and the opportunity for entrepreneurship. It's not magic, not yet anyway. This is the time to go start a company, or build every weird idea that you were never going to get around to.

There are so many opportunities to create software and companies, we're not running out of those just because it's faster to generate some of the code.

Returning to the iOS analogy, though, there was only a short period of time in history when a random developer with a flashlight or fart app could become successful in the App Store. Nowadays, such a new app would flop, if Apple even allowed it, as you admitted: "You can still start as an iOS developer today, but the opportunity is different." The software market in general is not new. There are already a huge number of competitors. Thus, when you say, "This is the time to go start a company, or build every weird idea that you were never going to get around to," it's unclear why this would be the case. Perhaps the barrier to entry for competitors has been lowered, yet the competition is as fierce as ever (unlike in the early App Store).

In any case, there's a huge difference between "the barrier to entry has been lowered" and "those who don't use LLMs will be left in the dust". I think the latter is ridiculous.

Where are the original flashlight and fart app developers now? Hopefully they made enough money to last a lifetime, otherwise they're back in the same boat as everyone else.

Yeah, it’s a bit incendiary, I just wanted to turn it into a more useful conversation.

I also think it overstates the case, but I do think it’s an opportunity.

It’s not just that the barrier to entry has been lowered (which it has) but that someone with a lot of existing skill can leverage that. Not everyone can bring that to the table, and not everyone who can is doing so. That’s the current advantage (in my opinion, of course).

All that said, I thought the Vision Pro was going to usher in a new era of computing, so I’m not much of a prognosticator.

> I also think it overstates the case

I think it's a mistake to defend and/or "reinterpret" the hype, which is not helping to promote the technology to people who aren't bandwagoners. If anything, it drives them away. It's a red flag.

I wish you would just say to the previous commenter, hey, you appear to be exaggerating, and that's not a good idea.

The App Store reshuffled the deck. Some people recognized that and took advantage of the decalcification. Some of them did well.

You've recognized some implications of the reshuffle that's currently underway. Maybe you're right that there's a bias toward the LLM vendors. But among all of it, is there a niche you can exploit?

Would love an excuse to use it, but one has not come up in like 15 years since, hah.

A personal blog with a mixture of technical posts and other essays. No AI content.

Every time I write a post I find myself adding little features here and there, which is what I always wanted to be able to do with a blog.

The UK might be flying spy planes outside it's airspace when it's citizens were kidnapped. That's not a "combatant". Was the UK a combatant when flying spy planes near the Ukraine border?

I think you are way off the mark based on reporting, I'm not even sure how you are coming to these stated opinions.

This is a bad sign for design at Apple. It suggests a fundamental lack of attention to detail that would have been harder to imagine a few years ago.

What's driving it?

    > Burger menu
    > User agreement

    "User disagrees with the content of this site."

I had some sort of Nokia running on whatever 2kbps networking was going then, and would shave absolutely anything I could to make the forums load slightly faster.

Wade through ads

Skim a treatise on the history of centering content

Skim over the “this question is off topic / duplicate” noise if Stack Overflow

Find some code on the page

Try to map how that code will work in the context of your other layout

Realize it’s plain CSS and you’re looking for Tailwind

Keep searching

Try some stuff until it works

Or…

Ask LLM. Wait 20-30 seconds. Move on to the next thing.

I did that a lot initially, it’s really only with the advent of Claude Code integrated with VS Code that I’m learning more like I would learn from a code review.

It also depends on the project. Work code gets a lot more scrutiny than side projects, for example.

Aaand done. Very first result was a blog post showing all the different ways to do it, old and new, without any preamble.

Given how often people acknowledge that ai slop needs to be verified, it seems like a shitty way to achieve something like this vs just checking it yourself with well known good reference material.

If you haven’t been convinced by pure argument in 2026 then you probably won’t be. But the great thing is you don’t have to take anyone’s word for it.

This isn’t crypto, where everyone using it has a stake in its success. You can just try it, or not.

But there is an interesting looking-glass effect at play, where the truth seems obvious and opposite on either side.

You: Hey ChatGPT, help me center a div.

ChatGPT: Certainly, I'd be glad to help! But first you must drink a verification can to proceed.

Or:

ChatGPT: I'm sorry, you appear to be asking a development-related question, which your current plan does not support. Would you like me to enable "Dev Mode" for an additional $200/month? Drink a verification can to accept charges.

Microsoft’s dedication to infusing OpenAI tech into everything seems like a play to cut even those tepid brains out of the loop and capture the vehicles of planning and production. Training your workforce to be dependent on third-party thinking, planning, and advice is an interesting strategy.

An article about the best open weight models, including Qwen and Kimi K2 [3].

[1]: https://openrouter.ai/models

[2]: https://huggingface.co

[3]: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/30/

DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp has 37B active parameters, GLM-4.7 and Kimi K2 have 32B active parameters.

Lets say we are dealing with Q4_K_S quantization for roughly half the size, we still need to move 16 GB 30 times per second, which requires a memory bandwidth of 480 GB/s, or maybe half that if speculative decoding works really well.

Anything GPU-based won't work for that speed, because PCIe 5 provides only 64 GB/s and $2000 can not afford enough VRAM (~256GB) for a full model.

That leaves CPU-based systems with high memory bandwidth. DDR5 would work (somewhere around 300 GB/s with 8x 4800MHz modules), but that would cost about twice as much for just the RAM alone, disregarding the rest of the system.

Can you get enough memory bandwidth out of DDR4 somehow?

Come on!

Even just moving it to the bottom helped move a lot of our usage into cache.

Probably went from something like 30-50% cached tokens to 50-70%.

It turns out I accidentally purchased one each of a fibre-assembly and direct-attach-copper! I was not paying close enough attention.

From what I understand, the difference between these will be negligible at the range I'm using (1m), but is that accurate?