It's the same thinking that led the Nazis to write "Arbeit macht frei" over the gates of their death camps. They didn’t want the prisoners to know that they were slated for death, nor could they execute them immediately when they first entered the camps — but they could put them to work. And that "Arbeit" wasn't anything like your fulfilling collaborative project; it was soul-devouring drudgery. HELL on Earth. The intent was the infliction of living death.

They had built the tool explicitly because we *couldn’t afford* to hire a data analyst for a few weeks to do the work.

I couldn’t help but think about what their response would be if someone *accidentally* spent £1,000 on other, non-AI work.

BTW: Argentum Online has about 75 players per day on steam, so it's doing 10 times better than Wyvern.

(The early age of home computing was a magical time, but if I wanted to recapture that the very last thing I'd want to do is sign myself over to the companies that are a major part of why it now isn't)

Once the OS was there, writing applications was much more straightforward, and usually a single person job.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68K/OS (that's my handwriting on at least one of the labels)

With 16-bit instructions, a 32 KiB ROM (not huge for that era) is space for 16,384 instructions. Most programmers could write a couple of hundred instructions per day, at least, so that's only 2.5 person months to completely fill the ROM with code, assuming that you're writing assembly. Once you get to 1 MiB of code memory, you're talking a lot more, but that was the tail end of that era.

But most of the time people weren't writing from a completely empty PROM, they'd have a bunch of service routines for things like maths, line drawing, and so on. Often even a BASIC interpreter, so they weren't writing assembly. Even as a child, I could run out of code memory before I ran out of things I wanted to do quite easily.

The early PCs were also like this. My first Windows machine had 640 KiB of RAM. Windows used most of it. Almost all of the programs I used were C or C++, a few Pascal, and a huge number of them were from a single author.

"When you’re targeting machines with well under 1 MiB of RAM, there’s a limit to the maximum possible complexity, which is less than one person can build."

Disagree. Starting from scratch (an empty PROM) it can very easily take at least half a dozen people to write enough assembler to use the full capabilities of a machine that large. Certainly if there's any timescale pressure from the client, which there always is.

I think these people are building what could become a commodity market (models) tied to a commodity market (model inference) tied to a commodity market (electricity) variably tied to a commodity market (lol fossil fuels because USA power mix), aka literally razor-thin margin hell because they don't even get geographic barriers to make the markets non-ideal.

A lot of people, including me, were attracted to programming in the ‘80s and early ‘90s because it was a field where you could work on your own and achieve something worthwhile. A lot of the games I played growing up are individual or very small team projects. A load of the useful programs were built by individuals.

Adding more people to a team didn’t really help. When you’re targeting machines with well under 1 MiB of RAM, there’s a limit to the maximum possible complexity, which is less than one person can build.

As the complexity ceiling increased, programming became more like engineering: a team sport. Specialism because useful and so, therefore, did collaborating with people with different specialisms. As a load of things proved to be common to large classes of program, collaboration and shared common implementations became much more important.

I think there are a lot of people, especially my age and above, who strongly disliked that transition. The ability to go back to one person sitting in a dark room by themselves creating a masterpiece is their ideal. And LLM vendors are aggressively targeting that misanthropic nostalgia because many of these people are now decision makers.

Those of us who grew up with Babylon 5 know that humans build communities.