... but what about video games?

I get asked this rhetorical question a lot, in various forms: Sure, datacenters might use a lot of energy, but you don’t have to use a hosted frontier model to do software development. What if I just run a local open-weights model to do some coding, with an open-source coding agent? Video games also use my GPU. Is local model development any worse than playing a video game? So I want to write down my comprehensive answer to this: Yes, using an LLM to write some code is worse than playing a video game, for a few reasons. Video Games Are Interactive, LLMs Are Batch Jobs Video games use compute to respond to human input. You are using your GPU while you are looking at a screen, displaying an image. When you are done playing, you shut off the game, and your computer goes back to idle. It’s much less energy. By contrast, agentic loops with evals (the only kind of “AI” that is meaningfully any good at coding) are running hot, for days. To use the most recent example of such a thing, a very…