Are We Harold Bloom?

# Are We Harold Bloom? Source: [https://abner.page/post/are-we-harold-bloom/](https://abner.page/post/are-we-harold-bloom/) *A human wrote this essay\.[Proof of work](https://abner.page/videos/bloom-essay-proof-of-work.mp4)\.* Harold Bloom was a professor at Yale and a famous author and literary critic: think Roger Ebert but for books\. Many considered him a prick and colleagues bristled at him\. This grumpy professor’s in my noggin lately, because I happen to participate in an online community,[Lobsters](https://lobste.rs/), which I find is bursting at the seams with Harold Blooms\. \(Except we’re software engineers, not generally book authors\.\) This isn’t criticism*per se*because I’ve discovered that, oh my God, I’m Harold Bloom too\! What do I mean by this? I bet my life savings you’ll understand If I shared a minute of him on TV\. I invite you to watch the professor’s vituperation of Harry Potter while that mass phenomenon was in its cradle\. \(Potter Heads are well\-advised to skip this one as it’s a little brutal\.\)[PDF Transcript](https://abner.page/pdf/bloom-tv.pdf)\. Your browser does not support the video tag\. At first I was amused by the unabashed elitism, yet as the[full interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVWiwd0P0c0)unfolded I began to see myself in Harold Bloom\. I was startled to hear “slop” lobbied a quarter\-century ago against the work of another author\. The resemblance grew more unnerving as[his peers reacted](https://youtu.be/jpaMMoxq4fM?t=538)to the berating\.[PDF Transcript](https://abner.page/pdf/bloom-critics.pdf)\. Your browser does not support the video tag\. Indeed when I trash the AI hype profiteers my friends will mirror the above opinion, labeling me reactionary\. A contrarian\. I could also tell they were reaching for “snob” or “asshole” and stopped just short of it\. It’s important to make fun of ourselves\. I do appreciate Lobsters: I[adopted](https://handmadecities.com/chat)their invite tree system for my own community\. However, I can’t unsee the Bloom filter\. I read Loris Cro’s lovely[North Star](https://kristoff.it/blog/north-star/)and agreed with it\. I also couldn’t help myself picturing a smug smirk, his extended pinky poking me in the eye as he picked up his tea\. Do we want to pull folks back to more sanity? For now I’d stash our monologues on craft and reach for everyone’s wallets\. You might’ve heard AI usage is priced more realistically this year\. Data centers are stalled or blocked\. Investors are getting nervous\. No one knows[how to map](https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-revenge-of-the-business-idiot/)AI output to a productive workforce: > Seriously,*somebody please show me a company spending millions of dollars on AI tokens that can also express a clear, indisputable return on investment\.*Show me the actual returns\. Show me the processes automated and what those processes*being*automated do to offset these remarkable costs\. All of this fucking*bloviating*about how AI is*inevitable*and*real*and*so powerful*never seems to result in*a profit*\. This is a powerful argument to me\. Because the value isn’t palpable so people are panicking at our new cost of compute: - Uber’s COO[admits](https://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2026/05/17/uber-burns-its-2026-ai-budget-in-four-months-on-claude-code/?ref=wheresyoured.at)it’s*“harder to justify AI costs within the company\.”*\(They blew past their annual budget\.\) - Now that it’s gone, Copilot users[are astonished](https://www.reddit.com/r/GithubCopilot/comments/1tbfkui/ill_just_leave_this_here/?share_id=t2EmVzRZDr3cKIeSb8Qh7&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1)how much their token subsidy was worth\. - Axios revealed a company unknowingly spent half a billion dollars \(\!\) in a month after failing to place usage limits\. - Orgs are[desperately moving away](https://archive.is/6dPNb)from so\-called tokenmaxxing\.*“Throwing AI licenses at the wall and seeing what sticks isn’t leading to tangible returns\.”* Here’s a funny one that made me blink rapidly: > One CTO told Axios that employees were using AI models to check the weather\. That gets expensive fast I’m the rare low\-level programmer who loves bars, clubs and meeting absolute strangers\. When I tell the Seattle tech\(\-adjacent\) scene that GitHub is[conclusive proof](https://eblog.fly.dev/githubbad.html)our industry fell into disrepair I get blank stares\. However, if I pause my Harold Bloom impression for a moment and talk about executives scrambling to measure productivity? Suddenly their eyes widen and they’re nodding with ease\. They can feel software hasn’t gotten any better to justify the investment\. The focus of Lobsters is narrowed to computing\. Business rants are off\-topic\. But what is my blog post? If engineers are increasingly charged for the “privilege” of compute it becomes impractical to disentangle the two\. I found it’s very persuasive to cease lamenting our craft and instead point to a defective business enterprise\. I’m seeing it fold the more neutral devs into our camp\. \-Abner