Readit Newsmecredis commented on Perverse incentives of vibe coding fredbenenson.medium.com/t... · Posted by u/laurex
I disagree with the idea that LLM providers are deliberately designing solutions to consume more tokens. We're in the early days of agentic coding, and the landscape is intensely competitive. Providers are focused on building highly capable systems to drive adoption, especially with open-source alternatives just a git clone away.
Yes, Claude Code can be token-heavy, but that's often a trade-off for their current level of capability compared to other options. Additionally, Claude Code has built-in levers for cost (I prefer they continue to focus on advanced capability, let pricing accessibility catch up).
"early days" means:
- Prompt engineering is still very much a required skill for better code and lower pricing
- Same with still needing to be an engineer for the same reasons, and:
- Devs need to actively guide these agents. This includes detailed planning, progress tracking, and careful context management – which, as the author notes, is more involved than many realize. I've personally found success using Gemini to create structured plans for Claude Code to execute, which helps manage its verbosity and focus to "thoughtful" execution (as guided by gemini). I drop entire codebases into Gemini (for free).
Hi! Author here. I don't actually think they're deliberately doing this, hence my choice of "perverse incentives" vs. something more accusatory. The issue is that they don't have a ton of incentive to fix it.
Agree with you on all the rest, and I think writing a post like this was very much intended as a gut-check on things since the early days are hopefully the times when things can get fixed up.
mecredis commented on The $100M Deal for Kickstarter to use Blockchain fortune.com/crypto/2024/0... · Posted by u/bmm6o
Kickstarter was and will always be beholden to their credit card processors and a painful lesson in picking one’s payment provider carefully. It’s your payment processors fraud risk department which dictates which products and services you offer not your own team. This decision is a 100% dictated by pigeonholing themselves here and losing out to gofundme.
After Philips caused a stink about LifX[1], it was the threat of losing their payment partners that caused Kickstarter to ban all sales of hardware [2]. They would later walk back that decision but not before we launched our own open source competitor that went on to do $100m, including Bitcoin support in 2012 [3].
Which is to say decentralized payment systems solve a lot of problems for crowdfunding platforms. Specifically Kickstarter missed out on the explosive growth that GoFundMe captured because Kickstarters payment processor said “no” and GoFundMe’s said “yes”.
But switching to Celo or some other platform in 2021+ feels too little too late for a platform whose culture has ossified.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2012/09/03/16...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/07/the-story-of-lockitron-cro...
You’re making a lot of assumptions about what was happening behind the scenes with a payment processor agreement you weren’t privy to. Kickstarter was always and devoutly uninterested in medical fundraising, so missing out on GoFundMe’s growth was a feature, not a bug.
In any case, I revised the title to "SendGrid isn’t emailing you about ICE or BLM. It’s a phishing attack."
Maybe someone can edit the title of the submission on HN accordingly?