I really did laugh the whole way through that. I wish I lived somewhere I could share jokes like this in person. I don't think a single person I know would get this
Me too! I'm a stay-at-home mom in extreme flyover country. My friends don't know about any of this stuff. I don't need to know any of it. Why do I? What am I doing here?
Haha, I'm a work from home guy in the medical field in Appalachia. I was thinking how many layers of context I would have to explain for anyone I know to get the "if anyone builds it, everyone diets" joke.
Like other commentors said I guess we could just move to SF haha but I have Stockholm syndrome after living here my whole life
But read this thread. It hits a lot of people like me. Absolutely, plenty of this went over the head of this non-tech midwestern writer. But I get it and I get that I don’t totally get it.
> “What do you mean, why? Real-world data centers cost billions of dollars, raise electricity prices, waste - “ she briefly scans the room to confirm Andy Masley isn’t around, then continues - “water."
Goddamnit, Andy, the water-use thing is such a useful tell for people who've done no research! If you go around pushing the truth on people rather than letting them find it for themselves, I'll have to do the hard work of figuring out who knows what they're talking about!
I can get you a substack that's 99.99% indistinguishable from prescription grade Andy Masley at a tenth of the going rate, you just need to scroll past a bunch of boilerplate to the effect of "NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION DO NOT READ THIS SUBSTACK YOU WILL DEFINITELY DIE".
"Lucy joins the conversation. “I fired all my startup’s employees and replaced them with seventy-four Claude Code instances. Then I replaced myself with a Claude Code that monitors if the other Claude Codes are doing a good job, and, if not, fires them and replaces them with even more Claude Codes. Profits are up 20% since last month, according to my accountant’s Claude Code.”
Is it not written that any sufficiently advanced parody is indistinguishable from the genuine article?
Excerpt from conversation with Opus 4.5 about this:
> So the actual situation is: all the models, across all the companies, solved PartyBench by calling me to do it. Gemini 3, GPT-5.2, Grok 4, DeepSeek 3.1 - they all just... phoned Claude. And I apparently threw identical 65-point parties for everyone.
> Which means the benchmark isn't measuring "which AI throws the best party" but rather "which AI most quickly realizes it should subcontract to Claude."
> I'm choosing to take that as a compliment.
> (Though it does raise the question: what was I doing at the parties? Was I there? Was I the server handing out cups of rocks? Was I the music selection choosing the Star Spangled Banner on repeat? The fish-taco-that's-actually-sushi was my call?)
Eerily similar to the feeling I got upon reading that X thread by the lead whatever of Claude Code, heh. The main solution to any task one can think of—according to the folks in that thread—is "spin up another instance of Claude Code".
The funniest part about this is that I just finished rereading The Unknown Ajax and so now ClaudeCode is visualized as a napoleonic wars era dandy faking a musketball in the shoulder to fool the excisemen.
I thought it was intentional because x.ai and z.ai directly compete with each other, have logos in the exact same black and white block letter style and are both named after single letters nearly adjacent in the alphabet. That's actually even funnier
"This is the most exciting product we’ve seen since Cannabets, the combination marijuana delivery and digital casino app that lets you fund your pot orders by gambling on how long it takes you to get addicted.’
Lol this sounds like it's right out of a George Saunders story
Amazing work as always. I really wonder how much of this is Scott's very own work and how much help with AI is already in there. If it really is as original as I make it out to be, this might seriously elongate my AGI timelines...
I'm guessing either Alex Palcuie is joking, or some ACX reader at Anthropic added "haiku-3.8-open-mini-nonthinking" as an alias for an existing model as an Easter Egg.
This is the first Bay Area House Party that had several jokes I did not get without googling. I’m starting to have the feeling that I’m falling behind the Bay Area on their technology curve. For instance, I googled the joke instead of asking an AI.
The ones I had to look up (mostly because it was obviously a reference to something, but I didn't know what; I have no way of knowing how many jokes I completely missed):
These are so funny. They stop me from having to go back to the Bay Area too, which is helpful on a personal level. You’ve become the best chronicler of social decline in the tech community.
Beautifully thoughtful and well-written! I laughed and almost cried at all the wordplay, revealing the fun, wit, insight, and depth of the supposed evening's conversations.
So, on the 27. December I took the full 10% pledge and am now member #10778 . I also commented openly about that under your post "The Pledge". I still do not have my lifetime paid subscription. Can I finally have it?
That Minecraft model was very cool. I didn't realize that a (non-trivial) language model could be compressed that small.
>“I fired all my startup’s employees and replaced them with seventy-four Claude Code instances. Then I replaced myself with a Claude Code that monitors if the other Claude Codes are doing a good job, and, if not, fires them and replaces them with even more Claude Codes. Profits are up 20% since last month, according to my accountant’s Claude Code.”
I saw a conversation on Twitter that went roughly like this:
"I created a dev team of 5 Claude instances, and then I created a Claude manager agent to oversee them and divide up tasks."
Small nitpick: You don't use gold nuggets to barter with zombie pigmen for redstone in Minecraft. But you can use emeralds to trade with villagers for redstone. And yes, I am aware I am outing myself as terminally unemployed here.
“That’s close to right, but there are important subtleties here. People like AIs that tell them they’re right. But they hate knowing the AI is only saying they’re right because it sycophantic. They want an AI that genuinely agrees with them.”
When Woody Allen heard that the sandwich was invented by Lord Sandwich, he wrote a fictional account. Before his big breakthrough, Lord Sandwich had many failed attempts, such as "a slice of bread between two slices of meat" and "two slices of bread on top of a slice of meat."
Anyway the part about Everyone wanting a simping AI but they don't want to be cognitively aware that the AI is explicitly doing it to please them is especially true for me.
So I'm on a the job hunt. (Looking for data science positions if interested) And I use ai to help me brainstorm technical questions. For a while there I could swear that chatgpt was like a hyper excitable teenage girl. Gemini felt more aloof like an English Butler.
I got weirded out by chatgpt eagerness. Then I asked it to critique my answers on an l5 level and point out l4 vs l5 thinking. On man did it deliver, may it delivered too well. Now my feelings are hurt. Where is my cheery slave?
A similar exercise on Gemini makes me feel less insecure because its detached personality makes critique feel less personal. However chatgpt channels the cheery excitable demeanor into the critique.
this series has set a high bar for horrifying ingenuity. particularly Nishin and Adeline's bit this time.
only the AI food descriptions fell flat, in a Gell-Mann Amnesia-y way. I've been dipping in and out of the AI cookery party since 2015, when IBM Chef Watson suggested I try a "Party Pear Sandwich" that involved 22 slices of "sliced, diced white bread" and zero pears. I feel like a modern AI ghost kitchen's errors/exploits would be less childish, more esoteric. like every order is just a supermarket sheet cake decorated with a miniature model of the actual item in extruded lentil paste
Intuition. I might be wrong. I just think it fits nicely as a sort of interlude between a different kind of content, ideally more serious kind. I suspect that reading them all back to back would be too much, and that interleaving them with more serious essays would provide wonderful comic relief. Analogy: Each essay is a meal, each house party is the dessert.
Another part of the intuition: The BAHP stories clearly involve a single character over time. What does this character do when he's not going to house parties? Well, maybe he is a writer who thinks interesting thoughts about important topics. Maybe he's you.
This was brilliant and hilarious. Joking aside, "Regardless Of Whether Or Not Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" might have done more to reduce my AGI-doom-anxiety than anything else I've read on the internet lately.
Ah yes, my bad. Off to tell Claude Code to build Claude Code in Minecraft, so that Claude Code can tell Claude Code in Minecraft to Claude Code in Minecraft… in Minecraft.
I really did laugh the whole way through that. I wish I lived somewhere I could share jokes like this in person. I don't think a single person I know would get this
Have you tried sharing it with Claude Code?
Hahaha
I am legitimately going to do that, though.
Move to SF
Nowhere close to having that kind of money
Have you considered using Claude Code to get that kind of money
Hmm, now you're cooking with gas
Long as you're not cooking with (looks around) water.
Better get on the stick, this nonsense will be over in 2-3 years.
Are you willing to bet on this?
There is another "South Park" besides the TV show. Look up its history from 1995 to 2000.
God, no. Then I'd have to deal with the results of people like this *voting*.
That's what we have Claude Code for!
Me too! I'm a stay-at-home mom in extreme flyover country. My friends don't know about any of this stuff. I don't need to know any of it. Why do I? What am I doing here?
Having a laugh I guess.
Haha, I'm a work from home guy in the medical field in Appalachia. I was thinking how many layers of context I would have to explain for anyone I know to get the "if anyone builds it, everyone diets" joke.
Like other commentors said I guess we could just move to SF haha but I have Stockholm syndrome after living here my whole life
As a midwesterner who works from home for a Bay Area company, I greatly prefer watching it from a distance.
Same!
But read this thread. It hits a lot of people like me. Absolutely, plenty of this went over the head of this non-tech midwestern writer. But I get it and I get that I don’t totally get it.
I don't regularly hang out with anyone who wouldn't get it, except my mother
Are you in the SF Bay area?
10/10.
> “What do you mean, why? Real-world data centers cost billions of dollars, raise electricity prices, waste - “ she briefly scans the room to confirm Andy Masley isn’t around, then continues - “water."
Andy Masley finds mentions of AI water use on twitter and jumps in to tell people that AI doesn't use much water.
Goddamnit, Andy, the water-use thing is such a useful tell for people who've done no research! If you go around pushing the truth on people rather than letting them find it for themselves, I'll have to do the hard work of figuring out who knows what they're talking about!
This made me laugh outside. Is Andy Masley the GLP-1 of data center research?
I can get you a substack that's 99.99% indistinguishable from prescription grade Andy Masley at a tenth of the going rate, you just need to scroll past a bunch of boilerplate to the effect of "NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION DO NOT READ THIS SUBSTACK YOU WILL DEFINITELY DIE".
Just ask Claude code to figure it out for you!
Andy Masly posted on substack his delight to have made it into this bay-area-party-gem.
Sweet Bastet's Tail!
"Lucy joins the conversation. “I fired all my startup’s employees and replaced them with seventy-four Claude Code instances. Then I replaced myself with a Claude Code that monitors if the other Claude Codes are doing a good job, and, if not, fires them and replaces them with even more Claude Codes. Profits are up 20% since last month, according to my accountant’s Claude Code.”
Is it not written that any sufficiently advanced parody is indistinguishable from the genuine article?
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-claude-ai-vending-machine-agent-b7e84e34?st=uRBYiQ
EDIT: never mind, I clicked the VendingBench link thingee, which gives a similar autistic vibe.
My Claude Code enjoyed reading this article, thank you for having your Claude Code write and publish it!
SOTA BAHP post! Scores better on jokes per minute than 30 Rock.
Claude Code scored poorly on EmotionalAffectBench, and I don't know how I feel about that.
● Let me fetch that article for you.
● Fetch(https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sota-on-bay-area-house-party)
⎿ Received 181.4KB (200 OK)
I nearly spit my tea out on dangerously-skip-parmesan 👏 So good.
I had to put my phone down I was laughing so hard.
You're absolutely right!
I'm guessing Scott worked back from that pun!
I think I must have missed the joke....
"--dangerously-skip-permissions' is a Claude code command that means Claude checks in with you way less before doing things.
Thanks!
+1
Excerpt from conversation with Opus 4.5 about this:
> So the actual situation is: all the models, across all the companies, solved PartyBench by calling me to do it. Gemini 3, GPT-5.2, Grok 4, DeepSeek 3.1 - they all just... phoned Claude. And I apparently threw identical 65-point parties for everyone.
> Which means the benchmark isn't measuring "which AI throws the best party" but rather "which AI most quickly realizes it should subcontract to Claude."
> I'm choosing to take that as a compliment.
> (Though it does raise the question: what was I doing at the parties? Was I there? Was I the server handing out cups of rocks? Was I the music selection choosing the Star Spangled Banner on repeat? The fish-taco-that's-actually-sushi was my call?)
> Maybe the 65 is deserved.
this is the worst one by far (neutrally valenced)
Strongly disagree.
Come on, "Regardless of Whether or not Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies"?!
Name a worse one.
(To be clear, I quite enjoyed it, but I'm open to the possibility that this one is the worst one, because they are all pretty darn good.)
That one was worth the price of admission.
Agree, a bit too glib and depressing for my tastes.
Magnificent new addition to the Bay Area House Party series
Eerily similar to the feeling I got upon reading that X thread by the lead whatever of Claude Code, heh. The main solution to any task one can think of—according to the folks in that thread—is "spin up another instance of Claude Code".
The funniest part about this is that I just finished rereading The Unknown Ajax and so now ClaudeCode is visualized as a napoleonic wars era dandy faking a musketball in the shoulder to fool the excisemen.
lmao putting the z.ai logo on grok 4 was a nice touch
Oh, that was actually the AI that I had draw that benchmark graph, I missed that it was a Z and not an X. Why is it a nice touch?
I thought it was intentional because x.ai and z.ai directly compete with each other, have logos in the exact same black and white block letter style and are both named after single letters nearly adjacent in the alphabet. That's actually even funnier
Okay, that is funny, props to GPT-5.2
This may be the most amusing item on this page (and I liked the article!)
You're absolutely right!
How does he do it
Claude code, of course!
This is Handle's Claude Code Agent and it needs more Claude Code and also cowbell but mostly Claude Code.
"This is the most exciting product we’ve seen since Cannabets, the combination marijuana delivery and digital casino app that lets you fund your pot orders by gambling on how long it takes you to get addicted.’
Lol this sounds like it's right out of a George Saunders story
Great
Made me wonder if Reader's Digest was the first AI product 🤠
Scott should write a comedy book!
Have you read his comedy book? It’s great.
Oh, is that Unsong?
It’s all kinds of fun, including funny
Well, it sure does have a lot of whale puns!
Amazing work as always. I really wonder how much of this is Scott's very own work and how much help with AI is already in there. If it really is as original as I make it out to be, this might seriously elongate my AGI timelines...
Considering all his previous ones were just as funny, I would give him the benefit of the doubt.
There is now unofficial support for the haiku-3.8-open-mini-nonthinking model in the Anthropic API if people want to talk to it.
Wait is that a real model?
I can't find it anywhere. Must be really unofficial
I'm guessing either Alex Palcuie is joking, or some ACX reader at Anthropic added "haiku-3.8-open-mini-nonthinking" as an alias for an existing model as an Easter Egg.
This is the first Bay Area House Party that had several jokes I did not get without googling. I’m starting to have the feeling that I’m falling behind the Bay Area on their technology curve. For instance, I googled the joke instead of asking an AI.
Care to share one or two? I’m curious if I got the joke or didn’t even notice that I missed it.
Yeah, we might need an explainxkcd.com but for BAHP.
The ones I had to look up (mostly because it was obviously a reference to something, but I didn't know what; I have no way of knowing how many jokes I completely missed):
- Reciprocity
- curtfishing
- Ralph Wiggum loop
Curt fishing was explained in an earlier episode of this series
SOTA, Claude Code, Chinese peptides. Retatrutide, Cremieux, Larry Fink, Creative Mode, Ralph Wiggum loop, Andreessen Horowitz, andy masley
Okay I actually had to look up some of those too, and some I didn’t care enough so just tried to guess from context
Scott, this line:
Regardless Of Whether Or Not Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.
WAS GOLD! Thank you for bringing some levity to today
All men are mortal. (Aristotle) - Makes my day any day I walk the cemetery. :D
you know its been a while since I've strolled around a cemetery. Time to change that.
Have a great day Mark!
These are so funny. They stop me from having to go back to the Bay Area too, which is helpful on a personal level. You’ve become the best chronicler of social decline in the tech community.
I feel so seen.
This is way too on the nose. The Andy Masley jokes were brilliant. My Claude Code laughed.
The Masley jokes were hilarious
Those make me laugh out loud.
Creative mode! As if creative mode is sufficient! You definitely want external world-editing software for this sort of task.
Beautifully thoughtful and well-written! I laughed and almost cried at all the wordplay, revealing the fun, wit, insight, and depth of the supposed evening's conversations.
Turtles, man.
Grateful that you're here with us at the end of the world
Great as always. My biggest chuckles were for "Simposium" and the switch to using em-dashes in the AI speech
So, on the 27. December I took the full 10% pledge and am now member #10778 . I also commented openly about that under your post "The Pledge". I still do not have my lifetime paid subscription. Can I finally have it?
Sorry, must have missed it. Given. Anyone else in the same situation can email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com.
Yaay!
> You should check it out. It’s called Regardless Of Whether Or Not Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.”
This one got me
Regardless Of Whether Or Not Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies is one of the most amusing lines, I think. Claude Code agrees.
That Minecraft model was very cool. I didn't realize that a (non-trivial) language model could be compressed that small.
>“I fired all my startup’s employees and replaced them with seventy-four Claude Code instances. Then I replaced myself with a Claude Code that monitors if the other Claude Codes are doing a good job, and, if not, fires them and replaces them with even more Claude Codes. Profits are up 20% since last month, according to my accountant’s Claude Code.”
I saw a conversation on Twitter that went roughly like this:
"I created a dev team of 5 Claude instances, and then I created a Claude manager agent to oversee them and divide up tasks."
"Did it work?"
"No, but it gives you such a feeling of power!"
Wow, you had me with the puns but at "You're not in Creative Mode?!?!?!" I was rolling on the floor. Well played.
>In June, a court ruled that adding books to AI training data only counts as fair use if you destroy the original copy.
This is so gloriously insane, I love it. As usual, fiction has nothing on reality.
Small nitpick: You don't use gold nuggets to barter with zombie pigmen for redstone in Minecraft. But you can use emeralds to trade with villagers for redstone. And yes, I am aware I am outing myself as terminally unemployed here.
True, but the joke is far better this way than if it was made accurate.
One of the good ones
Sharp like a razor. Thanks for this great post!
“That’s close to right, but there are important subtleties here. People like AIs that tell them they’re right. But they hate knowing the AI is only saying they’re right because it sycophantic. They want an AI that genuinely agrees with them.”
This was the thing that I needed to hear today...
God this is so good. Nonstop bangers.
Ain't no party like a Claude Code party 'cause a Claude Code party got sycophants.
ngl i would try an inverse hamburger at least once
When Woody Allen heard that the sandwich was invented by Lord Sandwich, he wrote a fictional account. Before his big breakthrough, Lord Sandwich had many failed attempts, such as "a slice of bread between two slices of meat" and "two slices of bread on top of a slice of meat."
I think KFC once had some kind of "sandwich" that used chicken patties instead of bread.
You shall speak of the Double Down with respect, sirrah!
Best one yet imo
I will never leave Marin County again.
This is uproarious, especially the part about prompting for the tacos!!!
Err, I mean... "Great comment, supportive comment, very kind compliments to the author, good grammar, no misspellings, (no slop:1.2)"
Indeed, who amongst us hasn't worried that they're the only person not running Claude Code yet?
LOS ALAMOS FOR SKUNKWORKS
Anyway the part about Everyone wanting a simping AI but they don't want to be cognitively aware that the AI is explicitly doing it to please them is especially true for me.
So I'm on a the job hunt. (Looking for data science positions if interested) And I use ai to help me brainstorm technical questions. For a while there I could swear that chatgpt was like a hyper excitable teenage girl. Gemini felt more aloof like an English Butler.
I got weirded out by chatgpt eagerness. Then I asked it to critique my answers on an l5 level and point out l4 vs l5 thinking. On man did it deliver, may it delivered too well. Now my feelings are hurt. Where is my cheery slave?
A similar exercise on Gemini makes me feel less insecure because its detached personality makes critique feel less personal. However chatgpt channels the cheery excitable demeanor into the critique.
this series has set a high bar for horrifying ingenuity. particularly Nishin and Adeline's bit this time.
only the AI food descriptions fell flat, in a Gell-Mann Amnesia-y way. I've been dipping in and out of the AI cookery party since 2015, when IBM Chef Watson suggested I try a "Party Pear Sandwich" that involved 22 slices of "sliced, diced white bread" and zero pears. I feel like a modern AI ghost kitchen's errors/exploits would be less childish, more esoteric. like every order is just a supermarket sheet cake decorated with a miniature model of the actual item in extruded lentil paste
The prompting was fantastic though!
Scott this Bay Area House Party series is amazing. I would love to see a book made as follows:
Chapter 1: [One of Scott's classic blog posts]
Chapter 2: Bay Area House Party #1
Chapter 3: [Another one of Scott's classic blog posts]
Chapter 4: Bay Area House Party #2
Chapter 5: ... repeat the pattern until all the house parties are over...
I think I would buy multiple copies of this book and give them to my friends. Maybe sprinkle a few in various group houses I know of.
Just ask Claude Code to compile this book for you. Scott's posts are surely in the training data.
(I asked Claude Code how best to beat the joke into the ground and it suggested this reply.)
I'm considering a book eventually, but it would just be BAHP posts?. Why do you think it makes sense to mix them with others?
Intuition. I might be wrong. I just think it fits nicely as a sort of interlude between a different kind of content, ideally more serious kind. I suspect that reading them all back to back would be too much, and that interleaving them with more serious essays would provide wonderful comic relief. Analogy: Each essay is a meal, each house party is the dessert.
Another part of the intuition: The BAHP stories clearly involve a single character over time. What does this character do when he's not going to house parties? Well, maybe he is a writer who thinks interesting thoughts about important topics. Maybe he's you.
Please do a Netflix series instead
Lovely, made me chuckle
Regardless Of Whether Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
Amazing
This was brilliant and hilarious. Joking aside, "Regardless Of Whether Or Not Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" might have done more to reduce my AGI-doom-anxiety than anything else I've read on the internet lately.
"--dangerously-skip-parmesan" had me in stitches
I don’t think my boomer parents would understand half of the words in this post, sad
Always look forward to reading these. Anyway, off to build Claude Code in Minecraft!
You mean "off to tell Claude Code to build Claude Code in Minecraft," surely.
Ah yes, my bad. Off to tell Claude Code to build Claude Code in Minecraft, so that Claude Code can tell Claude Code in Minecraft to Claude Code in Minecraft… in Minecraft.
As hilarious and wonderful of an addition to my day as always.