Environmental Impact

Reactions to the author's suggestion to 'always have an agent running,' with users expressing alarm at the potential energy consumption and environmental cost of millions of developers running constant background inference tasks for marginal productivity gains, described by some as 'cooking the planet.'

The prospect of AI agents running continuously sparked visceral alarm among commenters, who fear the massive environmental toll of such widespread energy and water consumption. Many expressed a "physical flinch" at the idea of millions of users accelerating climate change just to produce what they dismiss as low-quality "vibe-coded slop." Ultimately, these critics argue that the marginal productivity gains of constant background inference tasks are not worth the ecological cost of "cooking the planet."

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How much electricity (and associated materials like water) must this use?

It makes me profoundly sad to think of the huge number of AI agents running endlessly to produce vibe-coded slop. The environmental impact must be massive.

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> having an agent running at all times

This gave me a physical flinch. Perhaps this is unfounded, but all this makes me think of is this becoming the norm, millions of people doing this, and us cooking our planet out much faster than predicted.

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