Saturday, 19th July 2025
One analyst recently speculated (via Ed Conard) that, based on Nvidia's latest datacenter sales figures, AI capex may be ~2% of US GDP in 2025, given a standard multiplier. [...]
Capital expenditures on AI data centers is likely around 20% of the peak spending on railroads, as a percentage of GDP, and it is still rising quickly. [...]
Regardless of what one thinks about the merits of AI or explosive datacenter expansion, the scale and pace of capital deployment into a rapidly depreciating technology is remarkable. These are not railroads—we aren’t building century-long infrastructure. AI datacenters are short-lived, asset-intensive facilities riding declining-cost technology curves, requiring frequent hardware replacement to preserve margins.
— Paul Kedrosky, Honey, AI Capex is Eating the Economy
So one of my favorite things to do is give my coding agents more and more permissions and freedom, just to see how far I can push their productivity without going too far off the rails. It's a delicate balance. I haven't given them direct access to my bank account yet. But I did give one access to my Google Cloud production instances and systems. And it promptly wiped a production database password and locked my network. [...]
The thing is, autonomous coding agents are extremely powerful tools that can easily go down very wrong paths. Running them with permission checks disabled is dangerous and stupid, and you should only do it if you are willing to take dangerous and stupid risks with your code and/or production systems.
A few months ago I added a tool to my blog for bulk-applying tags to old content. It works as an extension to my existing search interface, letting me run searches and then quickly apply a tag to relevant results.
Since adding this I've been much more aggressive in categorizing my older content, including adding new tags when I spot an interesting trend that warrants its own page.
Today I added system-prompts and applied it to 41 existing posts that talk about system prompts for LLM systems, including a bunch that directly quote system prompts that have been deliberately published or leaked.
Other tags I've added recently include press-quotes for times I've been quoted in the press, agent-definitions for my ongoing collection of different ways people define "agents" and paper-review for posts where I review an academic paper.