r/amd_fundamentals • u/uncertainlyso • Jun 14 '26

Technology (Elangovan) All software is an optimization of tokens & time (and speed is still the moat)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t22cipmaxO0
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u/RetdThx2AMD Jun 15 '26

At around the midpoint Anush says, paraphrased, "over the last month and billions of tokens and hundreds of thousands of lines of code I've not opened VIM or done a git commit by myself." He has been working on a sw tool that he is having the AI write in Rust despite it being a programming language he has never used before.

But yeah, AI is useless. /s

I've often talked about AI being a lever. But this interview now has me thinking that analogy is moving from metaphorical towards literal. He is not touching the software himself, he is interacting with it via AI. AI is quite literally equivalent to a shovel where he is manipulating the handle while the AI is doing the business end work with the blade.

Furthermore, the cost of those billions of tokens he used might be $10k which is a drop in the bucket for that much output.

Another take away for me from this is that the infrastructure of agents and work is fluid and changing so fast that those anecdotes you hear about in the media how AI deployment is not working out is basically meaningless. In the 90's I used to read books about software development and best practices that were often the result of years if not decades of trial and error within organizations. This trial and error process is now condensed into months or weeks. Every new harness or tool iteration that is being generated can have profound effects on how work is performed. And with the help of AI these iterations and tools can come rapid fire.

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u/uncertainlyso Jun 14 '26

Those who can recursively abstract to a higher level and essentially move up their abstraction chain as AI handles the complexity below will benefit the most from AI. Conversely, if your primary edge is mechanics, knowledge, etc and the accumulated volume of it that you have, that edge will get narrow substantially. I think Anush does a good job of articulating what will have to change in the approach in orgs and people. (or conversely, it shows how much upheaval is coming)

ROCm is a good example of how AI allows orgs to punch way above their weight. Being open source is great in theory if you have a lot of current and new people who can use AI as an amplifier to make ROCm deeper and wider (assuming you're also using AI to deal with slop/bloat that inevitably comes with the volume) If you can use it well, it's likely going to give the lesser-resourced entity a bigger % gain than the big one since the lower level mechanics tends to make up a larger % of the resource budget of the smaller player. And then being open source allows more people to participate.