It's ridiculous to call this tulips, in the sense of a speculative asset whose price depends on resale. A more similar recent example is the dotcom boom and bust based on building internet infrastructure, or the 2008 crash which was based on cyclical infrastructure overinvestment. These crashes were characterized by demand growth not keeping up with investment because the target markets were tapped out. Not clear when we'll get there with AI. The consumer market seems saturated on chatbots but we're not even close to saturated for b2b or self driving for example. And this discounts other new technological offerings which may unlock larger consumer markets (products where people are willing to pay $100 a month instead of 10 or 20)

All that said the dotcom boom is extremely analogous and that crash was quite bad.

> Seriously, what value are tokens providing other than justifying layoffs. Concretely. Today.

Claude helped me implement a ridiculous amount of features in my programming language. It's helped me migrate the heap to an easily moveable index-based object space. It's helped me implement generators. It's helped me implement a new memory allocator. It's helped me fix a ridiculous amounts of bugs and make a huge number of small improvements everywhere. Its ability to provide me repository wide code review was a game changer for a solo developer like me. And it's doing so much more than that. I got more things done in the past few weeks than previous months even though I'm evaluating, learning, understanding and rewriting the AI output.

It's actually addictive to build things with Claude. The usage limits are starting to make me anxious, just like withdrawal syndrome. I applied for their open source max subscription program even though I'm too small for it because who knows, I might get in anyway and it costs nothing.

AI is quite literally a world changing technology. I hope the open models keep steadily progressing and that hardware remains available to all so we can run our own models on our own computers one day.

Tulip futures skyrocketed, it was economic speculation on a useless asset, not supply and demand. Crypto is the analogy, not AI. Given that the major AI labs other than GDM are private, this is even more true.

Agentic coding absolutely blew up from demand, users are not being tricked into paying $200 a month, and they’re not complaining about hitting rate limits because it’s useless.

>Seriously, what value are tokens providing other than justifying layoffs. Concretely. Today.

It's adding tests for me and doing medium complexity refactors that I'd otherwise have to spend hours on

I know there is a large force on HN that want to deny the value of tokens and I know it’s anecdotal but the writing is on the wall. If it’s not valuable to your workflow today it will be soon. I already have tests being written, automated hooks into bugs where an initial PR gets generated with a potential fix. It’s far from perfect but junior engineers are far less productive.

> Seriously, what value are tokens providing other than justifying layoffs.

Coding, writing, summarizing, translating, data analysis, customer support, test generation.

are you seriously comparing AI to tulips? I don't even know what to say. Even if you are very bearish about the technology certainly you can't be this detached from base reality. Yet here we are

> Seriously, what value are tokens providing other than justifying layoffs

Like the OP said, it's incredible how polarizing this debate is. When I read comments like yours, I feel like a significant part of the global workforce in IT must be living on another planet? Or they never really used Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, ... intensively before because of company policies?

I legitimately am at least 10x more productive than a year ago, and I can prove it in number of commits and finished monetizable features developed per day. Obviously my workflows still very much require an active, constantly context-switching human-in-the-loop, but to me there's absolutely no question both output volume & quality have skyrocketed.

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Tulips had literally no economic value. LLM's do.