Saturday afternoon thoughts… on ai. AI is getting good fast and it’s enabling people to build stuff they might never have been able to before which is great for innovation. Putting aside my opinions on vibe coding which are starting to change slowly, we are seeing an explosion of new tools and projects, which again is great. However, there is a storm coming as far as I can see… Today for $200 a month you can build a project and potentially a very good one that people use… but what Fable has done is bring into focus how fragile this ai bubble is… Imagine you used Claude to build an app and it works and people use it and even better let’s say it’s making some money, not @elonmusk money but some money. You’ve built a business where for $200 a month you can deploy a website that you didn’t build and dont understand into Linux server name you can’t even pronounce using this thing called a pipeline ? Huh… now when it breaks or there is a bug or you just wanna add a new feature you’re gonna open up Claude give it a simple prompt and 15 mins later, you’re golden… Until the day comes when the ai companies want a return on their 200x subsidy they’ve been giving you, yep a $200 Claude subscription can cost anthropic as much as $20000 a month. So fast forward to the day… You’ve built this tool or site, it’s working, you need to make a change so you open up Claude and … huh how you gonna afford to make a quick 15 min change when it’s gonna cost ya $1000 ? You’ll look for a software engineer like me to help and I’ll say sorry I’m too busy cus most of the engineers retrained to be a plumber and I’ll now be charging $5000 a day, or maybe I’ll be a plumber 🤪 Who knows… all I know sitting here watching an ai deploy code for me, a job i used to do myself, I wonder what will become of this ai bubble.

Thanks to djatlantic for sharing the opinion. 👇 I quoted this tweet as i feel like it sums up how most moderate people feel... irritated. I think that the biggest issue is that when David aka @JoelKatz speaks, he has an authority that goes beyond pretty much anyone else in the XRPL community. People cling to what he says and sadly unless he is extremely clear, what he says gets taken out of context and used to suit other peoples own agenda. It's worth noting that he was addressing a group of trainee core developers, not a community of non-devs. It was probably a mistake in hindsight to publish such a video, given the nuance of the conversation will be lost on many; its also worth noting that he was answering a question on the fly, without prep, so just gave a response, this was not an announcement of moving the code to Rust; he merely acknowledged that this has been discussed and how he saw such a thing working. For the record, this whole Rust discussion has been going on for over a year or more. This is not news. Summing up, this is why i wrote my longer piece; nothing is decided; sensible discussion is good and welcomed, hyping this up or fudding it down, is what i aim to help calm, along with other sensible people like @msvadari @angell_denis and others. So i don't blame people for wanting to understand it, I don't blame anyone for getting excited, but I do call out anyone who bends this type of news to suit an agenda. especially those touting this as the latest reason XRP is gonna "pump". We are not porting rippled to Rust! not today anyway. To my knowledge all that is happening is Rust is being talked about in the context of how it could be used to enhance the current tech stack and benefit the chain. If anything does progress with this, it will be a big deal but equally from the perspective of 99.9% of people, it will be a total nothing burger, cus the goal of such a change would be to do it so that nothing actually changes outwardly. No new xrp, xrp is xrp. No airdrops, Nothing to download or install or upgrade, no changes needed to existing code. A total nothing burger, beyond low level benefits and no... moving to rust is not (on its own) going to make the xrpl process 10x more transactions per second, LMAO. C++ is actually an extremely efficient language, this is not like comparing rust to javascript. If after evaluation, the benefits outweigh the negatives, I'd fully support it in whatever form it takes, but to the best of my knowledge we are a long way from any kind of announcement, in fact there may not even be an announcement, this is low level engineering, it makes no difference to most people and you wouldn't really know when its been done anyway. I really hope that future discussions around this can stick to facts and be meaningful, as opposed to turning this into yet another drama. Thanks to anyone that read my second rather long post on this subject, if you got something from it, please share it.