• Yesterday, I saw this report: Meta employees consumed 73.7 trillion AI tokens in a single month. This costs roughly $221 million a month and around $2.65 billion a year. That s the salary of about 9,000 engineers.

• In addition, the consumption of tokens (energy and electricity related to it) also has its limits.

• Many people are starting to boycott AI. Today I read in a private message from a company profile: "Was about to sign up and noticed you use AI images, so decided not to"

I don t doubt that AI makes our lives easier and creates opportunities in many ways.

But don t you notice the fact that at a certain point it becomes unsustainable and disadvantageous?...

I tried an experiment. For 30 days, every time I caught myself making an excuse for why I wasn't doing something, I wrote it down. No editing. No judgment. Just the raw excuse.

Here are the ones that appeared most often:

• "I'll do that when I have more time."

• "I need to learn more before I start."

• "I'll wait until the product is more polished."

• "I don't want to bother people."

• "They probably won't respond anyway."

• "I'll do it tomorrow when I have more energy."

• "I should focus on building first."

Reading them back was painful. Not because any single one was unreasonable on their own, they all sound kind of sensible. But together? Together they were a wall.

I recently installed @Augment Code based on an ad somewhere, and I'm super impressed, but haven't heard a peep about it in most channels. But it got me wondering what else I'm missing. This is a crowded field with a few frontrunners and a lot of more esoteric newcomers, but I want to know about the ones that blow your mind but hardly get any coverage.

First post here. Been browsing Product Hunt for a while without an account and finally made one.

Small frustration. So many products won't let you see anything until you make an account. No demo, no screenshots of the actual interface, no way to poke around. Just a signup form and a promise.

Half the time I sign up, look around for two minutes, and realize it's not for me. Now they have my email and I have nothing. I've started just closing the tab when signup is the first step, even if the product looked interesting.

Wanted to know how other people deal with this. Will you sign up to try something you're on the fence about, or does that immediately kill it for you? And has a product ever won you over with just a good demo, no account needed?

First post here. Been browsing Product Hunt for a while without an account and finally made one.

Honest question about my own behavior. I upvote things way more than I try them. Something looks interesting, I hit the arrow, feel like I participated, and move on. I couldn't tell you the last thing I upvoted and then actually signed up for.

It's not that upvoting is bad. It's just that it's become this frictionless thing I do while scrolling, and it has almost nothing to do with whether I'd use the product. Which makes me wonder what the upvote even means to me at this point.

Do you upvote things you'd actually use, or do you upvote to signal "this looks cool" and move on? And has anyone here found a product because of the upvote count specifically, or do you ignore the numbers entirely?

In the AI era, it is no longer so difficult to finance things from your own resources bootstrapped (except for promotion or hardware-intensive solutions).

I have always saved money and tried to do things myself (what I didn't know, I learned to do to save on financial costs).

I was about to put my install count on my landing page. 2,411, which felt like a real number for something nine days old.
Then I split it by version and it fell apart. 0.1.0 got 172 downloads last week. So did 0.2.0, and 1.6.1, and every other version I have ever published, all sitting between 150 and 200. Nobody deliberately installs the first release of anything. A real user base concentrates almost entirely on latest. A flat line across every version that has ever existed is mirrors and scanners walking the registry, and they do that to every package, forever, whether or not one person wants your code.
So here is the check. It takes about two minutes. Split your downloads by version. Flat across all of them means automation. Concentrated on the newest one or two means people.Cross it against a surface only humans reach. My repo had 81 unique visitors while the registry was reporting 2,411 downloads. Thirty to one.Look for a spike with no correlated movement anywhere else. Mine had 1,542 downloads in a single day and the visitor graph for that day is flat. Nothing happened. A mirror woke up.
Then work out what you cannot see at all, which was the uncomfortable one for me. Anyone using my tool the way it is meant to be used never touches a single thing I can count. It runs locally. It never loads my site and never opens my repo. Their usage is indistinguishable from a scanner in the only number I have.
Search rank is the other one I would not lean on, and I say that as someone whose rank went up this week.
I am 5th on npm for "pre-production checklist" and 8th for "security checklist". Two days ago I was 8th and 8th. The only thing that changed in between was that I published a new version. Nobody needed anything for that to happen.
And then look at where my visitors actually came from. My own site, GitHub itself, the MCP registry, Google twice, Telegram once. npm is not on that list at all. Not low. Absent. Ranked 5th and it has sent me zero people, because almost nobody discovers a package by searching npm. They arrive already knowing the name.
There is a loop in it as well. npm's search score has a popularity component fed by download counts, and I have just spent this whole post establishing that my download count is mostly mirrors. So the rank is partly computed from the bot number, and then the rank gets quoted as evidence of traction. Same number, different hat.
The one query where my actual audience would be, "mcp checklist", I do not appear in at all. That is the only ranking of the four that would have told me anything useful, and it is the one nobody would ever screenshot.
What I track now is unique cloners, 116, and CDN file requests, 95 a week. Both far smaller than 2,411 and both far more likely to be a person.I still show a number on the site, because everyone does and a visitor reads mine against everyone else's. But I stopped using it to decide anything, and that turned out to be the part that mattered.
If you have shipped a package, go split yours by version. I would genuinely like to know whether anyone's is concentrated the way it is supposed to be, because I am starting to suspect almost nobody's is.

I started rock climbing in January. Not for networking. Not for "balance." Just because I wanted something that had nothing to do with building.

It turned out to be the best product decision I've made all year.

Not because I met someone who helped me. Not because I had a great idea while climbing. But because for two hours, three times a week, I completely stop thinking about my product. I can't check my phone. I can't refresh analytics. I can't spiral about churn. I'm just trying to not fall off a wall.

When I come back to my desk, I'm different. Less frantic. More clear. Problems that felt impossible at 9am sometimes solve themselves by 9pm, not because I worked harder, but because I stopped working at all for a while.