We are spinning up planet-sized brains just to format a JSON file

🤖 🤖 🫧 🪡 Are we watching a rerun of 1987?


(Yes, and it’s going to hurt exactly the same way)

The God Model Fallacy: Why the AI Future Looks Like 1987

We are spinning up planet-sized brains just to format a JSON file. That's the God Model Fallacy in a nutshell.

We’re in the Uncanny Valley: 90% on benchmarks, but the system still feels dumb in real life, and nothing truly works without heavy prompt massaging or multiple turns.

I spent the last 8 months (and most of my savings) architecting my own GenAI stack to learn if we engineers still have a future or should all quickly become founders for LLM-wrappers.

Here is what I think now:

We are repeating the Lisp Machine collapse, frame by frame.

1987 in two sentences

$100k specialized Lisp Machines were sold as the only way to run “real AI” (expert systems).


Then normal Sun workstations did the same job for $20 k → every Lisp Machine company went to zero literally overnight.

2025 direct translation

God Models (GPT-5, Claude Opus, Grok-4) = Lisp Machines


Nvidia H200 racks = Symbolics boxes

DeepSeek-R1, Qwen-2.5, Llama-405B + LoRAs = the Sun workstations that are already good enough

The actual future (it’s Unix, not bigger brains)

• Tiny router (1–3 B) → picks the lane
  


• Retriever → grabs context
  


• Specialist (7–70 B) → does the work
  


• Synthesizer → makes it pretty
  

Whole chain = ~1/100th the cost of one 405 B call

Runs locally on a 2027 phone. No data center required.

The part nobody wants to talk about: Integration Tax

Monolith world


→ expensive tokens, easy code

Chained world


→ almost free tokens, engineering hell (routing, fallbacks, latency, observability, race conditions)

Result?


It will be to complex to build open-ended user-facing LLM applications like chat-bots.

The Great Sobering (coming 2026–2027)

The day a random 3–8 B open-weight model on an M5 / Snapdragon casually does 95 % of what we currently pay $500k+/month for is the day the entire frontier-model funding circus collapses.

To the AGI maximalists: over-investing in a beautiful idea is the hardest thing to quit.

To the builders reading this:


The magic is dying.


Real engineering is finally allowed to start.

That’s actually good news.

Which boring, high-ROI workflow do you think survives the Integration Tax?