The AI Era Has Its Own Jiahaos

Different people react to different things in different ways.

Take me. I've been doing vibe coding for about two or three months. Every day I'm either fiddling with a new model or digging into some new project, and at the end of it all, I'm most likely feeling gloomy and anxious.

There's still so much I don't know about AI. Today, for example, I asked DC about searching for skills, because I realized I'm far too slow at finding them. That's one thing. Another is that when I work on projects, I always feel lost in a fog. I have a workflow, but the workflow is usually the most fragile part, and I keep running into all sorts of problems along the way.

Lately, for example, I've been working on a very complex project. I figure I've used hundreds of millions of tokens on it so far, and I still haven't gotten the whole workflow to run end to end. I wonder whether my process during development isn't good enough, or whether I'm meddling too much.

So, all in all, the more I use AI, the more anxious I feel overall. And that anxiety really comes from how hard it is to create.

Everyone has the ability to work. But not everyone can create something valuable through work.

I once said AI is a revolution in productivity that lets everyone program. Now I can say with 100% certainty that AI has lowered the barrier to development, but I feel it hasn't lowered the barrier to creating.

Creating is a good measure of how skilled someone is with AI and what they've achieved with it.

When we talk about using AI, we can't only talk about the tokens we used up and never about what we created with AI.

That's what a Jiahao is like. This year, "Jiahao" became a popular word online in China. I want to say that the AI world has its own Jiahaos too.

What's a Jiahao? Simply put, someone without much real skill who loves to act cool.

In the AI world, that's someone who posts "Only used 200 million tokens today, so anxious" one day.

The next day: "Topped up a few hundred bucks again today."

And at the end of the month: "Used just a few billion tokens this month."

And so on.

I have to admit, the world can't do without Jiahaos.

Because a Jiahao isn't just one person. It's a symbol of a whole group.

People in this group usually aren't behind the times. On the contrary, they have some trendy things going on. But to outsiders, it looks a bit like a clumsy imitation.

They're afraid of being left behind, yet they can't settle down and actually step into a new world. So all they want is to prove to everyone: look, look, I know about this, I'm using it.

If the AI world judged success by the number of tokens, you could just leave your computer on every day, throw repetitive tasks at it, and let it burn tokens nonstop.

When we're talking about all kinds of lofty ideas, concepts, and dreams, shouldn't we all turn around and ask ourselves: what have I created?

The word "create" can be grand or tiny, depending on the context.

Vibe coding a project that makes money counts as creating. Using AI to generate one usable image also counts as creating.

The point isn't what you create with AI. The point is that you focus on the process of creating.

As a tool, I think AI is down-to-earth by nature. You ask it something, and it answers you.

How many tokens you burned doesn't matter. What matters is what those tokens became in the end.

Now I finally get why compute is so scarce. So many people treat token counts as a measure of ability. And now some places give you 10 billion tokens just for registering a one-person company. No wonder things are taking off.

If we keep burning tokens like this, then come Qingming, when we visit the family graves, we'll be able to pay our respects to tokens too. After all, the whole token family are martyrs, burned by you every day.