this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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[–] rook@awful.systems 11 points 1 day ago (2 children)

There are other posts of the same story that include the original “dev” learning his lesson by using a cheaper model instead of just using a clock.

https://bsky.app/profile/rusty.todayintabs.com/post/3mdrdn3uu7226

There’s also a hackernews which is interesting : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46854150

Stupid stuff openclaw did for me:

  • Created its own github account, then proceeded to get itself banned (I have no idea what it did, all it said was it created some new repos and opened issues, clearly it must've done a bit more than that to get banned)
  • Signed up for a Gmail account using a pay as you go sim in an old android handset connected with ADB for sms reading, and again proceeded to get itself banned by hammering the crap out of the docs api
  • Used approx $2k worth of Kimi tokens (Thankfully temporarily free on opencode) in the space of approx 48hrs.

Unless you can budget $1k a week, this thing is next to useless. Once these free offers end on models a lot of people will stop using it, it's obscene how many tokens it burns through, like monumentally stupid. A simple single request is over 250k chars every single time. That's not sustainable.

I hadn’t realised quite how terrible the basic offering was. I guess every reinvented-cron-but-unaffordable project pushes the ai companies a little closer to bankruptcy, which is better than nothing, I guess.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 16 hours ago

thankfully temporarily free

god I can’t wait for the subsidies to end

[–] lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

$1000 a week?? Even putting aside literally all of the other issues of AI, it is quite damning that AI cannot even beat humans on cost. AI somehow manages to screw up the one undeniable advantage of software. How do these people delude themselves into thinking that the dogshit they're eating is good?

As a sidenote, I think after the bubble collapses, the people who predict that there will still be some uses for genAI are mostly wrong. In large part, this is because they do not realize just how ruinously expensive it is to run these models, let alone scrape data and train them. Right now, these costs are being subsidized by venture capitalists putting their money into a furnace.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

How do these people delude themselves into thinking that the dogshit they’re eating is good?

They think it's just that they're early, like they did with bitcoin. Maybe in six monthsthe dogshit will start to taste great, who's to say, and so on and so forth.

Also swengs in the USA often make absurdly more than 1K/week.

[–] lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I guess I can check back in six months to see how they're doing ... wait a minute, they were saying the same things six months ago, weren't they? That's a bummer.

[–] ShakingMyHead@awful.systems 4 points 16 hours ago

Well, sure, but that was six months ago.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Tired: it's required to taste

Wired: it's an acquired taste

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

they're already pivoting to the narrative that "local models will be plenty good enough and it will be trivially affordable to run them"

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 6 points 11 hours ago

i still think that lots of people damaged by chatbots will stop in their tracks when this vc money burning charade ends, they won't be able to set up it all locally because chatbots brainrotted them even if it was possible in the first place

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 11 points 23 hours ago

and it will be trivially affordable to run them

ON WHAT HARDWARE BEN, DDR2 SCAVENGED FROM JUNKYARDS???