Top all-time · #12995
Simon P. Couch
Personal blog · simonpcouch.com/blogaiprogramming
Simon P. Couch's personal blog at simonpcouch.com covers ai and programming. Since 2025, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 7 times, most often “Electricity use of AI coding agents”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-05, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Simon P. Couch's posts for an estimate of the energy use of coding agents, compared with everyday household activities like running a dishwasher or driving to the grocery store.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Building tools for data scientists at Posit (née RStudio)
Most-linked posts?
- Electricity use of AI coding agents3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-01-20
What Hacker News says?
I see it has a ChatGPT median query, but for those of us using coding agents this isn't so relevant. Here's a post that makes an estimate: https://www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01-20-cc-impact/ > So, if I wanted to analogize the energy usage of my use of coding agents, it’s something like running the dishwasher an extra time each day, keeping an extra refrigerator, or skipping one drive to the grocery store in favor…
Comment linking /blog/2026-01-20-cc-impact/
on “Does that use a lot of energy?”Submitted Claude 4 and R Coding as a story · 5 points
HN discussion> I am also an ardent user of AI - but sometimes I do feel guilty when I use so many tokens - because I know I am burning energy, and feeding part of this mission. If there is a solution, I would like to be a part of it. This is by far the best article I've seen on it [0]. Which leads me to conclude: if you use coding agents, then yes, it's definitely a concern. Yet if you drive daily, even an EV, it's very small co…
Comment linking /blog/2026-01-20-cc-impact/
on “Covering electricity price increases from our data centers”Submitted You probably don't want to fine-tune as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted I was wrong about tidymodels and LLMs as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted LLMs running on my laptop can drive coding agents now as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Electricity use of AI coding agents as a story · 1 points
HN discussion