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   Tim Bray (timbray@cosocial.ca)'s status on Thursday, 16-Apr-2026 11:14:53 JST Tim Bray

   So, more #genAI pain. By and large, the bubble's a bubble because the number of people out there in the business community who like it enough to be willing to pay for zillions of tokens, in aggregate trillions of dollars, is pretty small despite frantic pushing, and thus eventually it all pops.

   There is an exception…

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     Tim Bray (timbray@cosocial.ca)'s status on Thursday, 16-Apr-2026 11:14:52 JST Tim Bray

     in reply to

     And, that's the software dev community, where (whether you like it or not) there are many people who are willing to spend, in aggregate, (a small number) of billions of dollars.

     So, the investor community looks at that, gets dollar signs in their eyes, and says “Software is hard and GenAI is doing great there, so the rest of the world will pick it up, fer sure. Take my money, Sam!”

     Except for…

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     Tim Bray (timbray@cosocial.ca)'s status on Thursday, 16-Apr-2026 11:19:09 JST Tim Bray

     in reply to

     • Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     @evan depends how many people are willing to pay, I guess.

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     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Thursday, 16-Apr-2026 11:19:10 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     @timbray So, if it's real value that people are willing to pay for, is it a bubble? Or a business?

     I guess if software developers are paying enough that investors think it's interesting, but not enough to pay the expenses, and not by a large margin, that's probably a bubble.

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     Tim Bray (timbray@cosocial.ca)'s status on Thursday, 16-Apr-2026 11:19:11 JST Tim Bray

     in reply to

     So those of you who are burning millions of tokens on Claude Code should probably be aware that you’re one of the few remaining forces inflating the bubble.

     Whatever, it’ll pop anyhow, the #genAI space will become a tiny, mostly open-source, fraction of what it is today, and at that point. we devs can use it without feeling guilty.

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     Tim Bray (timbray@cosocial.ca)'s status on Thursday, 16-Apr-2026 11:19:12 JST Tim Bray

     in reply to

     The software-dev community is many orders of magnitude too small to keep the bubble inflated.

     And in fact #genAI works way better on code than on actual human language. Because the vocabulary is so much smaller and “doing the same as everyone else already has” is actually a good engineering practice.

     So…

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     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Thursday, 16-Apr-2026 12:06:20 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     @timbray Right. If revenue is only 0.5% of expenses, or even 5%, there's no way that unit economics can be tuned to make a profit. But if it's 50%, say, I think the traditional VC idea is to keep funding it, and then make it pay well in the future. I don't know if those percentages are anywhere near accurate, btw.

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     Bruce Elrick (virtuous_sloth@cosocial.ca)'s status on Thursday, 16-Apr-2026 12:31:29 JST Bruce Elrick

     in reply to

     • Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     @evan @timbray AI is the rare capital-intensive but also operationally-intensive industry!