Vibe Check: Reflective Essay

The lamp throws a cone of yellow onto the desk, and outside that cone everything is the blue of the monitor, patient and cold. On the desk, next to the mouse, there’s a USB stick I keep meaning to throw away. No label. I know what’s on it anyway.

Three years ago I built a scheduler. GPUs were a rationed thing then, a handful of racks shared by twelve teams who all believed their model was the one that mattered. I wrote queueing logic at two in the morning, tuned priority weights, argued in Slack threads about who deserved the next available card. It felt like triage. It felt like it mattered whether a training run finished by Thursday.

I remember the specific hum of the office fridge, not unlike the one behind me now. I remember thinking: this is the bottleneck of the century, and I am standing in it.

The company folded. The scheduler died with it, orphaned code nobody will ever read again. And now I read that Meta has so much compute they’re selling it off, the way you’d sell excess grain, the way scarcity becomes, eventually, a rounding error.

I turn the USB stick over in my fingers. It doesn’t mean anything anymore, not really — just plastic, a little dust in the seam.

The fridge hums. The cursor blinks in an empty document. I don’t open the file. I already know what’s in it: a version of urgency that the world quietly stopped agreeing with.

The apartment is a vacuum. My monitor’s reflection in the dark window confirms I’m the only one awake. I scroll past the headline: Meta is auctioning off compute, excess ballast for the AI wars. It prickles behind my eyes.

Ten years ago, I was building a sentiment analysis tool for a consumer startup. We scraped social media, trying to quantify public mood in real-time. It felt frantic; we were taming the beast. Compute was rationed then. Every Tuesday, I’d present a graph showing our latency spikes, pleading for more AWS instances. I remember the physical knot in my stomach when the database locked up during a product launch. We were scraping by, always just one server failure away from total collapse.

Now, entire racks of H100s are sold on the secondary market. The problem that consumed my waking life—the technical debt that felt like the weight of the world—is now solved by a single API call worth fractions of a cent. I touch the spine of a rusted, six-year-old WD Passport drive sitting on my desk. All that accumulated data and effort, contained in a heavy, lifeless rectangle that hasn’t been plugged in since 2019. The hum of the refrigerator in the next room seems suddenly, intensely loud. It marks the time passing faster than we can keep up.

The screen’s blue glow pools on my face, the fridge’s hum a metronome for thoughts I didn’t mean to have. A chipped mug—his mug—sits forgotten beside the keyboard. I remember the night we shipped the voice assistant, how we coded it like we were defusing a bomb. Urgent. Necessary. The kind of urgency that makes you swear at 3 a.m., convinced you’re saving someone’s time or sanity or sanity.

We built it to be everywhere, indispensable. Now it’s in landfills, its voice commands echoing in empty servers. Meta sells compute like widgets, and I wonder if they remember the weight of the code we bled into it. The mug here, still warm from yesterday, reminds me of his laugh when the prototype first worked. He said, “It’s alive.” I wanted to believe it mattered.

The news blares: “Meta Capitalizes on AI Surplus.” Surplus. The word tastes sour. We thought scarcity was the problem. Now I see we were the ones hoarding the tide. The screen flickers, and for a moment, I’m back in that server room, smelling ozone and regret. The mug is just a mug now. A relic. A different country’s problem.