Was it worth it?
Damn, look at you. You’ve scored that lucrative job at a trendy AI company. You’ve upgraded your Claude plan to the max and you’re running so many Opus agents and prompting with Fable that you can generate and build faster than you’ve ever managed in your working life. Finally all those extra data centers are paying off and there’s finally capacity for you to really step on the accelerator and iterate quicker than your brain can keep up with!
At long last you can make those fancy architecture diagrams for your projects, dazzle your coworkers with presentations with unique images for the problem that’s being solved for you. Those PRDs won’t write themselves… you used to say! Not anymore superstar.
Everything’s chugging along nicely on its own, you have tester subagents verifying the output of your builder subagents under the watchful eye of the supervisor agent and running loops so it never gets too stuck. Phew, you can pop out and get yourself a coffee to celebrate all that hard work.
…fucking hell, it’s a bit hot isn’t it?
All these tools and technological developments have allowed you to immeasurably improve your productivity (because there’s no good way to measure it). But as you step outside into the sixth heatwave in the UK since May 2026 you have to really ask yourself: was it worth it?
Look, I know that AI and technology isn’t the biggest contributor to climate change by a long shot, it would be lying of me to say otherwise. But why should we just bury our heads in the sand and make it worse? AI and the computing power needed to train and run inference is immense. The big frontier companies like Anthropic and OpenAI pledged a lot of money and capacity in the coming years—it remains to be seen if they deliver on that—and the power draw alone is catastrophic for our climate goals and trying to achieve net zero. Microsoft, Google and Amazon are still saying they intend to meet that goal.
Yet their emissions are going up. Anthropic will just buy carbon credits without doing anything credible directly.
I just… I don’t know. I’m looking out over the parks and fields near my flat in London and the grass is parched yellow and dead. The ponds seem to be getting drier and drier. We’ve had like one day of rain in the last two months. I’m feeling a lot of anxiety over our climate and seeing just how absolutely fucked it all is. And yet we all seem to just be… ignoring it? Fracking and mining more than ever, industries seeming to do fuck all about their emissions. And seeing people just carry on prompting and agenting and paying no mind to the horrendous impact that AI companies are having on our climate.
Sure, if all of the models stopped running tomorrow, we’d still be in a very bad way. But why not do ANYTHING instead of just making it worse?