AI coders are carrying half-open laptops

When your boss ranks you based on the number of tokens you burn, there's no choice.

or you can literally just do what is it? something+tab? and it just goes to town without the need for you to confirm anything.

I mean it's gonna turn out slop that won't scale and be full of exploits anyways regardless if you auto confirm or not. then just rig it up to ping your phone when it's done...oh who am I kidding these dudes wouldn't know how to do that.

I mean this is why I don't mind using AI, it gives me the time to focus on the people around me.

Also I see it as a sign of a lack of support and isolation in the workplace. Like "I need help, I don't have anyone to turn to cause everyone is fired so this is my only support" and the anxiety that brings.

Dude needs to start using cloud agents if he’s gonna be this shitty.

you know this article is bullshit right?

I mean... I'm almost glad they haven't figured out the power settings. Imagine if they were all running around with the lids closed and the laptops stuffed into a backpack? It would be a fire waiting to happen.

This has been true for 20 years.

Of all the things to compare pre and post AI

This is one that has not changed.

Considering that they are using pseudo intelligence* write the code I think the power settings is the least of our concerns.

*PI should replace AI as it is a more accurate title

I've definitely had windows straight up ignore the power settings before. Granted that was years ago, it's probably only gotten worse

It's fucking surreal watching these people rise to high positions in tech companies trying to sell the idea that they can replace physicians with their "product". Have fun with that mate.

This is nothing new

You've never worked with a dev department obviously.

corporate blocks most of the settings anyway

You are expecting the people who rely this heavily on AI to know how to actually use a computer?

The story here isn't actually about the laptops, it's about the people addicted to the AI use.

If the heat vents are above the keyboard the heat will go directly on the screen. I had a laptop screen stop working due to this.

It's an ad. You were reading an ad.

My gaming laptop emits a ton of heat in the chassis around the keyboard. Keeping it closed while it's running would likely be a very bad idea.

If they happen to be running any sort of models that are local to the machine that could be quite haphazard.

'AI coders' specifically.

Amen. what's so fucking difficult about screen/tmux and a ssh connection?

Also - ffs, they can't even disable sleep in system settings?????

It is. I don't know if you do any development or simply write code as a hobby but you get a sort of dopamine hit when something you're working on actually works. like a bug or something that's been dogging you for days and suddenly you figure it out. it feels good. I can't remember the quote but Linus Torvald said something similar. it's a good feeling.

Now imagine you get that constantly, consistently, again and again because you strictly use an AI agent. that's what these tech bros are getting. The problem is unlike actual devs they're getting that hit because it essentially "works on my machine" as really that's all the AI turns out. Something that surface level functions. So they're addicted to it. "oh man that was so fast and easy, lets build something else!" over and over again.

The problem then becomes they'll run out of ideas or things to build and will naturally have to start trying to maintain what the AI built utilizing the same AI. Annnnnd if you've had any experience with these agents you know "that's where the fun starts" those dopamine hits are going to vanish very quickly. Now these people are "chasing the dragon" so to speak. AI doesn't know it was the one that built the thing. I've seen it first hand with my clients vibe coders when I've asked them to go back into something that was built and have the AI start fixing bugs that I've found in my review. the vibe coder panics, it doesn't understand what the agent is telling them, the agent believes the vibe coder built this thing. suddenly it's not fun anymore. suddenly it's not churning out semi-working results. suddenly things are breaking.

This is the one aspect NONE of these companies or tech bros or vibe coders like to talk about it. Haven't you wondered why you rarely read stories of them sending their AI agents back into the thing its built to scale it or fix something? it never turns out well.

So it is an addiction. And they're all collectively chasing the dragon. But eventually they stop getting their hits and will crash out.

Oh shit, that's a great idea! I'm surprised claude didn't suggest it first. /S

You can, and you can also have the disabled sleep on close implementation screw up, have unintended consequences and weird behaviors. Half open lid? You know what you're getting.

A guy here shared a story about this AI guy his company hired, that was pretty clueless when it comes to basic tasks about his job. When he had to do the same thing a week later, he was still as clueless. Anyway, that made me think that AI people might have trouble learning things, because they just let a data center hallucinate an answer. I have the same thing when i use a navigation system, i don't really learn the way i go, i just follow an indicator.

Has AI really atrophied their tech skills that much?

These people never had any skill to begin with. They only have a codebase now because of AI.

I'm not in IT, just a lowly office grunt who is forced to use Windows on their laptop. I know most people here have forgotten that 99% of the working world has to use Windows, so let me remind you how much it sucks.

It doesn't matter how you change the laptop power settings, Windows will look at your settings and then just do whatever the fuck it wants when the lid closes.

Sometimes it goes to sleep

Sometimes it stays powered on and quietly overheats in your laptop bag.

Sometimes it completely freezes up and forces you to hold down the power button.

Sometimes it just logs you out and does nothing else.

Sometimes it will go to sleep, but the moment you open it back up it decides what you REALLY wanted was to restart.

Changing the settings has no effect on what Windows decides to do.

I know people on this site like to sit on their gilded Linux throne and sneer at all the lowly peons forced to use "Microslop" instead of their clearly superior, self-hosted, FOSS, Linux distro; but it is a real problem with Windows laptops.

“Claude, how do I change power settings on a laptop?”

Thank me later, AI users. ;)

You are not going to like the answer but yes. AI makes humans stupid.

some laptops use the keyboard as an airvent tho

I don't know, it has the opposite effect, IMO.

It just makes them seem obnoxious, since the example they chose was a parent who was distracted with the computer open in the changing room while they were supposed to be helping their children with their skates, and literally mentions how the other parents have to navigate around the thing.

You'd be more inclined to think that they're a computer addict who can't put the the thing down for even a moment.

On top of that, the video is basically a recipe to drop the laptop and have it shatter into fine powder, if you're holding it by the corner like that.

That is 100% the vibe I got from this article as well. They're trying to get this in the zeitgeist.

To be fair, often times coders are horrible system admins. Heck Torvalds famously runs Fedora because he found installing Debian too confusing.

Skill issue

Also,

The 15-year-old from Bentonville, Arkansas, is a 10th grader who's building a startup with his 24-year-old cousin. He uses Codex, Claude Code, and OpenCode (paid for with seed money from his parents).

Lul. Lmao. ROFL even.

I can't remember the specifics of it, but I vaugely remember someone pointing out that back in the 70s people assumed that rising productivity meant they'd have to work less. That if the work of a week in 1970 would be the work of three days in 2020, that they'd simply only work those three days. Even if I'm misremembering what was said, I feel like it's clear to see that rising productivity doesn't mean we're going to work any less. Capitalism will just keep squeezing until nothing is left.

on top of that, there is no way they are working on anything so important that can’t take an hour away or whatever. these dopes could also configure yolo mode if they just need to sit there and click “accept” to changes…

I'm sorry, you lost me at the 'Legal Entity' bit, that one always sounds like SovCit kool-aid. Got to be careful with that one, with so many libertarian crazies afoot.

After the advent of laptops, I tried taking them "out in the world" to work from parks, or airports, or whatever. Yeah, I could get some stuff done like that. No, it wasn't a great idea. It wasn't even a slightly good idea. The only "on the road" place that works for me is inside a sailboat in a marina - quieter than home or office, better environment for work. The only "good thing" that came out of road coding? Getting hit on by a curious woman while we were both stuck in SFO waiting for the LAX shuttle that was backed up.

Road coding out in the world? A great way to spend 4x as long to produce code of 1/4th the quality as what you could do in a less chaotic office-like environment.

This is the first setting I changed on every laptop I ever owned. So often I had stuff running in the background and didn't want it to sleep. Plus, windows had that stupid fucking sleep bug, so usually I'd use hibernate anyways.

The number of large scale 4the party outages in the last year or ves this is already happening.

Just a reminder that real devs are using AI, and even vibe coding because the alternative is unemployment. I agree with the sentiment, though.

You think people who ship apps with 127.0.0.1:[port number] as a URL can figure out how to set up a personal VPN?

Nah, it's okay. They probably don't have ideas worth stealing.

Yeah, I think I learned to do this with my first laptop within the first hour of using it.

Sf life

Yea I feel like a fool for not catching it, I've updated the post. I thought I'd opened the proper page and just copy and pasted.

Thank you, I was about to edit my comment to add it.

They would have to know something about technology

I remember being a young intern and a senior dev taught me about screen. It was cool and I immediately forgot how to use it.

Hey, claud. Don't let the computer go to sleep when I close the lid

Closes laptop lid

Hahaha

It's not running a local model anyway, why would you need to run anything local. If you're that careless, just deploy EC2 with headless claude and whatnot, and let it drop your production database do it's thing.

windows update that will override settings

That's just every update they push

Normally I want mine to sleep on close.

Kinda reminiscent of people walking while holding their phones on their palm face up like a slice of bread.

That 15yo in a startup has got to be a sociopath. You know how serial killers usually start by torturing random animals? It's the techbro version of that

It's also an ad for Business insider. This link is paywalled.

Looks like anti-ad to me. Wonder how much these guys got paid to be clowned around like that for the entire internet to see.

They think "do nothing" means the AI will do nothing.

That's what I'd do as well if I used AI. But that relies on knowing anything about using a computer beyond accessing a web browser

Shoutout amphetamine, awesome little app.

No need to install a separate app:

sudo pmset disablesleep 1

Most? With the amount of people running laptop docked I would say that is not the case for most business laptops for sure.

Decent ones dropped this practice a while ago. Some pull in the sides, some crappy ones use the bottom. My coworker actually got much better performance out of his dell by closing the lid and flipping it over. With it positioned normally it would overheat and throttle the cpu.

Do you have an example?

I tried to find something, but the only mention was five years old saying Alienware might try it.

It sounds stupid but with people using laptops on beds I could see the idea behind it.

If they increased the size of those little rubber feet to keep the screen and keyboard separate, then that would completely solve the issue.

I want to see if no one's thought of that yet since it seemed so obvious, but I just can't find any real example of keyboard cold air intakes. Are you talking about actual vents? Going between the keys may just be an urban legend from what I'm seeing.

Even if there was an intake in the keyboard it wouldn't dramatically affect anything. My P1 does partially intake through the keyboard and closing the lid has no appreciable performance impact. I only leave the lid open so the display doesn't get baked by the i9 using 70+ watts.

Micodeslop Windows

It’s weird, people love saying they ai code. But they don’t like admitting their products are vibe coded.

That new text rendering method was apparently brute force vibe coded in the pixel tolerances.

No clue if it's actually good software.

Everfall 2 is the "sequel" to Everfall, a vibe coded disaster of a game. The sequel only exists because the "dev" couldn't figure out how to get Claude to fix the fact that save games just didn't work. One week after publishing the original, he abandoned it saying the sequel would be given to everyone who bought the first at a "huge discount". After push back, he reduced it to free if you DM him on discord. The sequel is almost exactly the same as the first game except saving works more often. Like, literally 100% carbon copy. The screenshots on each steam page is proof of that.

I make web apps for work, they connect to vendor APIs and generate reports. It's pretty awesome, but idk i think im a unicorn. Tried to major in CS but just couldn't be perfect with my syntax and actually failed a couple courses because I couldn't get full programs to build even though I aced the conceptual on paper-quizzes. So I feel pretty good about knowing and understanding the apps claude is building for me even though i just can't get all the semicolons in the right place myswlf.

Thanks for pointing that out, I wasn't paying attention and thought I'd copied the direct link. I've fixed it.

"I think people think I'm whatever the equivalent of an iPad kid is for a middle-aged woman," one AI user said."

They don't think it bro they fuckin know it.

You could have locked the computer without logging out

My money is on the latter

What OS are you using?

All the real developers are using Macs. BRO, do you even code?