Be a human, don't be an AI.

"Don't Let AI Define You"

The thing that's been bothering me most lately is people bragging about burning through billions of tokens a day, or cranking out hundreds of thousands of lines of code with AI in a matter of days.

I won't even get started on the domestic hype merchants — they have zero ability to evaluate information for themselves, mindlessly swallowing every bubble inflated by the English-speaking tech sphere. These people are basically exclamation marks trailing English-language KOLs.

What actually bothers me are two examples. First, Jensen Huang running his mouth, saying that if he sees an engineer making $500K a year who hasn't burned through $250K worth of tokens in that same year, he'd be worried.

Second, YC president Garry Tan. For starters, the man looks like a kiwi, which is already irritating enough 🥝

On top of that, he's been aggressively hyping an open-source "AI software factory" he calls gstack, claiming it lets him write 20,000 lines of code a day, making him equivalent to a 20-person team.

For the past few days I've watched Twitter and WeChat public accounts churn with people hyping this thing, saying the YC president dropped something serious, that he's laying out ten years of investment wisdom, and that using this tool will make you a god too.

Unfortunately, gods don't exist — because if they did, they'd surely smite these hype merchants.

I actually tried gstack. This thing is no AI software factory; it's an emotional support product, full stop.

After installing it in Claude Code, it hit me with ten cutesy questions right off the bat — who are your target users, what's your product positioning.

Then it served up some platitudes to encourage me, followed by a YC job posting.

I laughed out of sheer disbelief at the output. This is the caliber of the old-guard investor?

Not a single sentence of substance in all that verbiage. Let me quote one passage: "The engineering barrier has disappeared. What remains is taste. And you've just proven you have it."

I need you to feed me garbage about "taste"?

The VC stench is indescribable. The user experience is identical to being cornered by an investor who won't stop interrogating you about your business model over two hours of coffee. I'd call it the investor-class version of a Shandong drinking banquet simulator, aka the Huamao Gaga simulator.

All I can say is, Garry Tan's investment acumen shows not at all, but his upward management skills are on full display. Maybe for VC firms, those two are the same thing.

The only substantive information in the whole thing was probably the YC job posting.

I'm literally crying. All these hype merchants falling over themselves to repost a YC ad generator, unpaid, in tears — it really proves that hype is the core competitive advantage of the tech industry.

Beyond the anger, I gave this some serious thought.

How does a collection of prompts, completely devoid of insight, pure investor boilerplate, a YC ad generator — how does this get hyped to 30,000+ stars on GitHub?

After some independent thinking, my conclusion:

1. The guy is president of YC. Most people only see the title; he could hype kiwis and it would work.

2. Most people have no ability to actually do things. Of those 30,000+ GitHub stars, I seriously doubt even one in twenty have actually used it. They're basically treating GitHub like Xiaohongshu.

3. The general public's FOMO around AI has reached epidemic proportions, igniting at the slightest spark. Mr. Kiwi Garry Tan provided the perfect case study for hype.**

From Lobster to Garry Tan, the clearest trend is GitHub becoming hype central.

Ever since AI can read and write code, GitHub is basically no different from a content community. But most ordinary netizens still have this impression of it as impressive, professional, a programmer's community.

This gives vast arbitrage space to hype merchants. Use AI to spam a bunch of garbage PRs, and if any get accepted, you can claim to be a core contributor to a notable project. Cook up a flashy concept, have AI write a README, and you can post it on Xiaohongshu. The way I see it, GitHub is currently the New Concept Composition Contest for our era. One bro came up with an even better metaphor: GitHub is essentially the Vienna Musikverein — every clown and demon that shows up here gets gold-plated.

Right, so I've also kept pace with the times and developed my own AI funeral CLI, releasing next week to ensure I'm riding the latest hype wave.

Having analyzed the American mini-Qiqi, let's return to Jensen Huang.

Everyone seems to have been possessed by Jensen Huang lately. Whatever the old Taiwanese man says, the masses nod along, like like like, repost, analyze, hype — the full treatment — as if they've all had neural implants installed and been force-fed by NVIDIA.

Jensen Huang, as NVIDIA's CEO, shooting the breeze with a few American streamers, is of course going to talk his book hard on token consumption.

An engineer burning through $250K a year? That's pocket change. He could've made it $2.5 million and it wouldn't make a difference. Who takes bragging numbers seriously, let alone analyzes them with a straight face?

I actually did think about it, though. $250K in annual consumption — that's not humanly possible for one person. You'd need concurrency, a swarm of agents running full tilt around the clock.

I can't even imagine the negative externalities this person would inflict on the world. How much Middle Eastern oil wasted, how much CO2 emitted, how much Brazilian rainforest destroyed, how much Antarctic ice melted, how much garbage stuffed into our already wretched internet.

Turns out AI stands for Artificial Illusion.

In the face of new technology waves, people have lost a basic common-sense instinct: wariness of vested interests.

The supplement shop owner says customers should buy $50K of supplements a year. The gym owner says customers need $100K of personal training annually. The McDonald's CEO says customers should eat five large fries per meal 🍟

Hearing this, you'd think the owner was adorable, money-mad to the point of delusion.

But when it comes to AI, common sense stops working. Every boast from AI CEOs gets swallowed whole without a second thought, and people feel deeply anxious about it.

Jensen Huang shilling his book is at least understandable — the man actually makes money from it.

What's worse are the people constantly hyping themselves online for burning through billions of tokens a month, writing hundreds of thousands of lines of code solo.

This is genuinely morally bankrupt. It's no different from capitalists dumping milk or students wasting cafeteria food.

Because inflating metrics is trivially easy. Just call the API, write a script to loop and generate garbage data. Run multiple API keys in parallel and you can refresh your token consumption by orders of magnitude. So token consumption doesn't prove anything at all.

This truly is the best era for internet entrepreneurship. E-commerce刷单 at least required shipping empty packages; app刷单 required buying data. Now AI products talk about token consumption, and you just run a loop program — inflate it however much you want. The more API fees you burn, the more investor gold you can mine.

No wonder when I was chatting with a crypto bro the other day, he ended up sighing: "The AI circle is what the crypto circle looks like to me."

I've wandered off track. Let me pull this back together.

Consumption cannot define you. Tools cannot define you. Using a particular tool, consuming however many resources — none of it means anything.

A person does not define themselves through any external force. A person becomes themselves through becoming aware of their own existence, step by step figuring out what they want.

You are what you come to be.

After all these years, my favorite stunt of the 21st century is still Elon Musk's masterpiece: launching a Tesla Roadster into space, a spacesuit-clad mannequin in the driver's seat, speakers playing Space Oddity, the dashboard screen reading "Don't Panic."

Don't panic, friends. Not using AI won't kill you.

Finally, let's place our bets: among HSG, Jinqiu Fund, and ZhenFund, which will be the first to learn from YC's advanced hype techniques and release the first Chinese VC CLI?

(Cover image generated by ChatGPT, purely human-written text, plus an outro track 🎷)

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