After AI takes everything

https://ursb.me/en/posts/after-ai-takes-everything/

by speckx • 1 month ago

102 113 1 month ago

ursb.me

Mistletoe• 1 month ago

Every machine is waiting for the next machine.

I like that. We are all machines.

grantpitt• 1 month ago

You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both.

pydry2• 1 month ago

I've started to realize after poring over pull requests which are, frankly, slop that the devs who are the most bullish on AI are the ones who raise those PRs and don't recognize the slop.

AI for sure is giving all of them existential crises but I'm not sure most of them ever really belonged in the industry in the first place.

I give it 9-12 months before they start to realize that acknowledgement of this existential crisis is at its core, acknowledgement of of a skill issue.

citrin_ru• 1 month ago

Many managers are more bullish on AI and less able to recognize slop, they are unlikely to recognize quality crisis. And they are the people who decide who belong to the industry and who is not. As a result we will get an escalation of enshittification and people will start to forget that slop is not the only option.

drudolph9142• 1 month ago

Yeah, I keep coming back to a point that the way people talk about AI is still entirely disconnected from what it can actually do. I think of the bell curve meme a lot when I see people talking about AI. the people most bullish to perpetuate that it's going to take over are people that have vested interested, or people that are fall on the bottom half of the bell curve. I mean ... come on, by design an AI is literally a statistical averaging of all the data it's seen. AI is extremely average at nearly everything it does. If you find yourself using AI and it's doing something amazing, that speaks more to your knowledge/ability about a subject more than it speaks about AIs ability

I mean, I guess if all you do is work on implementing CRUD endpoints ... sure I guess you're cooked. but we had tech to automate this already, this isn't anything new. But oh man, if you're doing real engineering, the tools are barely usable.

I hate when people don't give examples, so I am going to throw one here. just the other day, I asked the newest and most expensive claude model to write an LRU and to have a running tally of the capacity of bytes in the cache as the threshold to evict something from the cache. It wrongly implemented the threshold checks and just tracked how many elements were in the cache. this might sound small, but scale that mistake up to a real production system. this is literally unusable. and the expectation to sit there, have it generate 1000s of lines of code for you, and then spot check that small but huge error is not worth it. you have to move so slow to spot check everything - to the point that it's literally faster to type it. This is a model that costs $100s to run per hour and is advertised as "PHD level intelligence" making High school AP computer science to freshman computer science errors - like come on.

If you're reading this, are an expert in your field, and are actually worried about your job - you got be able to have some mental fortitude and not fall for this ...

sandoze2• 1 month ago

Where you see quality crisis I see job security! Honest question, when it comes to enshittification of software quality.. have you ever had to use a Meta framework? How many times have they rewritten their mobile apps to use some architect's bespoke code pipe dream? The quality crisis has always been here, now there's just more of it.

graypegg2• 1 month ago

I’ve tried to explain this to folks as “having taste”, but I’m always worried it comes off as subjective and snobby. It might be a fair assessment honestly, it’s hard for me to describe so I wouldn’t hold anyone to it as a standard. Give me an honest vibe check on that.

Theres a lot of codebases out there that are at odds with my own opinions about syntax/structure/purpose, but there’s evidence of “taste” that I absolutely respect. I can look at a couple modules, and have a good idea what the other modules are going to be like, because the mental model of the author is clear from the code itself. Even teams with multiple authors with taste average out to one taste-profile and in a similar way, I’ve seen LLM output shaped by someone with taste and had the same feeling: “yeah I see the direction you’re going in”.

Someone without taste using an LLM writes slop. I can’t tell what you’re doing. Any question about what you’re doing results in “sorry that was Claude”. Entirely pointless that you’re even involved.

It’s a property of the author IMO. They were kind of owed an existential crisis as cruel as that is to say.

SoftTalker2• 1 month ago

Was recognized long before AI came on the scene.

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.

Steve Jobs

dijksterhuis• 1 month ago

giving a shit == having taste.

giving a shit != perfect.

i recently had a PR which had a comment explaining a change of an import: "// Changed imports to add Foo as it's needed for updated bar()".

apparently the person behind "it" has been a developer for 10 years. couldn't be bothered to remove completely useless "how" comments from a 25 line change (without all the useless comments).

also, i posted on another AI slop thread about taste: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515463

rybosworld2• 1 month ago

I think it's likely that what you call slop is more often than not "good enough".

One thing a lot of developers aim for in their code, beyond "it does what it is meant to", is something along the lines of elegance (that's my word for it, there may be a better one).

With AI generated code there is no time for elegance. It will happily recreate the same function in several different places for no reason. And that really doesn't matter anymore.

Said another way: AI generated code doesn't chase perfection. It just chases good enough.

edukite2• 1 month ago

But it's not good enough. We can see this all over industry where even M$ is producing software so bad even calculator is electron app. Slow, poor quality and for any engineer below acceptable

sandoze2• 1 month ago

> It will happily recreate the same function in several different places for no reason

So do many developers. I've lost count how many times a code review had to be rejected or cleaned up because of copy and pasted code and I'm going to admit, sometimes it's just quicker to duplicate a little code and leave a comment for 'next time'.. we've all done it.

.. like this one time I had a PR and the developer created on loooong linear method, couldn't figure out how to share between targets and copied and pasted the same bad code somewhere else. Somehow it got through and when asked why this was on production the answer was 'it worked'.

> no time for elegance

This happens, your experience in is generally your quality out. But that doesn't necessarily mean there's going to be elegance. I've worked at major product driven companies where elegance took a back seat to getting release out the door.

pydry2• 1 month ago

So you have high slop tolerance.

This is fine, it just means that there's very little point if you're an IC.

mikgp• 1 month ago

It will happily recreate the same function in several different places for no reason. And that really doesn't matter anymore.

Does it not though? Once maybe, but at scale? All code is tech debt. The more duplication, the bigger context, the more grokking, the higher the odds of making a mistake.

I don't think it's a forgone conclusion that LLM's mean the end of caring about code quality. Maybe not in the same way as before.

hacker_homie• 1 month ago

It was never about the code, all that really matters is does it work.

In that light I’m not happy about it, but the code always was just a means to an end.

variadix• 1 month ago

People have built entire careers shipping garbage, now they can ship 10x more garbage and to them that’s progress.

marcosdumay• 1 month ago

I give it 9-12 months

That's a wildly optimistic take.

Most of them will never realize it by themselves, and will put the blame of people reacting badly to their work on the people complaining, not themselves.

no_multitudes3• 1 month ago

Writing tip: you do not need to have LLMs expand your ideas into a longer form for you. Spreading out your ideas across a longer post does not make them better.

pocksuppet• 1 month ago

My boss pays me for the lines of code, right?

jolt42• 1 month ago

"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." - Blaise Pascal

grey-area• 1 month ago

Unfortunately with word generators this has become -

I would have written a letter, but I couldn’t be bothered.

r1zzzzA• 1 month ago

third time i see this cliche quote in two days

stavros• 1 month ago

I enjoyed the fact that AI was used to deliver the anti-AI message.

hurtigioll3• 1 month ago

that fewer people will read because it spends pages saying what could be paragraphs

uludag• 1 month ago

Maybe you don't understand, if we didn't have LLMs expanding our ideas into longer form we wouldn't have anything to give to LLMs to summarize.

CuriouslyC3• 1 month ago

No, but it satisfies a number of algorithms that drive traffic to websites better, and there are honestly people who will upvote something that starts strong and is long without reading the whole thing, who wouldn't upvote that same strong start if it wasn't padded with filler to make it look more exhausitive.

Not a fan either but there are real game theoretic reasons to do it.

cdfalcon• 1 month ago

You think this was written by AI? I'm curious, why? Anytime I'm about to read a long post I generally paste it into a few detectors for sanity, but none of them flagged anything for this one. I read the entirety and thought it was pretty compelling - long maybe, but thoughtful. I appreciated the historical quotes interjected, and didn't find the prose suspect.

corvus-cornix• 1 month ago

Some of the formatting for emphasis and em-dashes looked a bit iffy. It's hard to imagine AI wasn't involved, at least an an editor or to discuss ideas. To be clear, I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with this.

no_multitudes3• 1 month ago

"On the surface it looks like an engineering question, or a career planning question, but underneath it is an existential question:"

"This gives us the first corollary of end-state thinking cold but honest:"

"What does the end-state look like? My take is simple — a single line: PRD is Code."

"This shift brings a quiet, lethal corollary: "

"But think clearly about what letting go means."

"It sounds like a lament; it is actually a refining process. "

"When the tide of the times is pushing you along, slow can be a discipline."

These outtakes are all fairly obvious unedited claudeslop that add nothing to the argument. The excessive use of bolding and em-dashes throughout the article are also signals.

imhoguy• 1 month ago

"—" "blast radius"

done :)

627467• 1 month ago

Isn't the original post in Chinese? English is probably llm translated - like the whole blog

no_multitudes3• 1 month ago

LLM translations of non-LLM text don't generally look as bad as this does. Many of the LLM-y traits -- inappropriate overuse of bolding and em-dashes, aggressively punchy sentences, and an essay that seems artifically stretched out to hit a word count -- are not affected by translation.

mizzao• 1 month ago

I actually didn't smell AI at all while reading this article, because the idea density seemed high, rather than when AI just expands a few ideas into repetitive mumbo jumbo. The last portion was a bit wordy and metaphysical, but he landed the plane at the end.

GaryNumanVevo• 1 month ago

Glad I wasn't the only one!

functionmouse2• 1 month ago

My answer: soon. By the end of this year or next, the year after at the very latest.

lol

Two More Weeks(TM)

GolfPopper• 1 month ago

I've noticed that "18 months" is a very popular prediction target, across a wide variety of prognosticators. Close enough to seem urgent, and if what they predict comes to pass anytime in the next few years, they can claim "See, I was right, just a little off on the timing because <excuse>". If it doesn't happen, most everyone will have forgotten their prediction. And in the unlikely event they get called out, they have over a year of random events to find a plausible fall guy for their failure.

stemlord• 1 month ago

That really pissed me off. Why do people continute to pretend they can predict the future

recursive2• 1 month ago

It's a valuable skill.

bregma• 1 month ago

Get used to it: I think we're going to be pretending to predict the future for many years to come.

biotechbio• 1 month ago

This post is a little long winded. At times I agreed, and others I felt the author was doing a little too much hand-wringing on what-is-mine vs. what-is-the-AI's.

The opportunity is and always has been the possibility of accelerating work. Honestly, if something works (I mean genuinely, actually works) I don't care at all about what craftsmanship or insight went into its creation.

We value these things because they have become correlated with quality. We now have the opportunity to decouple these things; maybe something that took no effort will be just as good as a painstaking human labor.

The risk is if this doesn't come true. If we let our skills degrade and get ahead of our skis, embracing "slop" that superficially appears to "work", we will eventually pay the price. Financially and culturally, it seems like we are already all-in on the bet that it will work.

I hope it does, I just want to solve the problems I am working on.

giancarlostoro2• 1 month ago

Honestly, if something works (I mean genuinely, actually works) I don't care at all about what craftsmanship or insight went into its creation.

That's where I'm at too. Saves you weeks of effort to boot.

visarga3• 1 month ago

But once you put something out, an app, repo, content, music or photo - it can be easily cloned with AI, changed to be different just enough to avoid accusations and customized as needed. The price of replication is dropping fast, and that means any perceived arbitration point will be competed away. I predict AI will be immensely valuable like Linux, but "nobody" (excluding shovel makers, for a while) will get rich off AI, because whatever it can clone is not a moat anymore.

visarga3• 1 month ago

I have my own take on what is ours and can never be taken away by AI.

When a task is initiated, it starts from a need, from a specific context. To work it out the AI needs to continuously interact with the context, and get feedback from it. At the end gains, losses, risks and costs sink back in the context.

The context is you, the person who prompts, your team or company. It is indexical and relational. It is maximally distributed. It cannot be hoarded. You can't eat so that I feel satiated. AI is called to do the work, but it can't handle 3 things - start, middle and end of a task.

swader999• 1 month ago

I agree with all that but the problem is what others will pay for. There might be niche artisans that survive but most of it might go the way of wallmart.

visarga3• 1 month ago

Yes, AI gives me superpowers but my competitors get it too. True, we are in a race to re-differentiate now. Companies too, imitation of anything we put out is approaching a very low cost.

silksowed• 1 month ago

Well said. Deciding what to build is derived by experience in the context of your problem space, and that is human centric. Makes me encouraged that as AI tooling increases in adoption, more people will build things to solve their problems. Instead of large corporations hoarding talent and then building things for people, I could see more small business success where they sit closer to the very things that need solving.

paul79864• 1 month ago

Overall, AI is irrelevant without us and it needs to pay us to keep it relevant (all the content we create naturally everyday) I think! It can not continue to be a bloodsucker!

agentultra• 1 month ago

Again, they didn’t smash the machines because they hated the technology or wanted everyone to be making lace by hand.

They were arguing for basic human rights in the workplace. Things like child labour were still super common and were among the practices the Luddites wanted to abolish. Along with the workhouses they wanted to replace with protection for workers (they didn’t have the word for it but they wanted a social security system).

They smashed the machines for leverage. There was little labour law at the time. Most of it was written by the capital holders with the help of the constabulary. Things like showing up to work on time or no pay, etc. Violence, controlled violence, was the tool they used to try and get the capital holders to the table and negotiate.

It failed, as we know, and it was a bloody failure. People were executed and jailed. The movement became a pejorative for someone who is backwards and against technology and progress.

embedding-shape3• 1 month ago

I think the vibe is generally same with AI too. If people believe AI will genuinely be used for good (like many in China seem to think, I get the feeling) then the public at large seems fine with industry focusing on it. But when people have the feeling or even expectation that it'll be used for things like increasing the wealth/wage/inequality gap, control of the masses, automated widespread surveillance and more, you get the violent attacks on data centers and such.

Maybe if these people who are basically wealthier than some countries would share their loot or just care a tiny bit about 99% of the rest of the world, people would feel differently about things. Use AI and your data centers to figure out how to quench, feed and power the entire world, and probably a bunch of people who hate AI would even get onboard.

CuriouslyC3• 1 month ago

People in China think AI will be used for good because China has a track record of protecting workers from the fallout of automation (see courts ruling people can't be wholesale replaced with AI), and they view the ridiculous surveillance less negatively because the party delivers low crime and rapidly improving economic circumstances.

paul79864• 1 month ago

If AI was paying for us all the content we create daily just by living, humans would love it. It would be a cyclical relationship where AI thrives off all the daily content all humans create daily and AI pays us for the privilege to thrive off of us (our content).

I saw Trump saying AI companies are discussing offering Americans stock in AI companies so that's one way where the narrative changes and a few days I thought of one way how AI can pay all of us for our content ..posted quick thoughts on my Substack... https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans...

Overall, AI is irrelevant without us and it needs to pay us to keep it relevant I think! It can not continue to be a bloodsucker!

embedding-shape3• 1 month ago

If AI was paying for us all the content we create daily just by living, humans would love it. It would be a cyclical relationship where AI thrives off all the daily content all humans create daily and AI pays us for the privilege to thrive off of us (our content).

I think you're on to something. Imagine OpenAI and Anthropic suddenly started funding millions of artists worldwide, basically "we pay monthly rent and food, you get to create what you want, we get rights to train on your output while you retain ownership", wonder how many would actually agree to that?

ks2048• 1 month ago

paraphrase> what's left for us? ... taste.

If human "taste" changes our cursor for no reason, maybe we should just go with the AI's "taste"?

Sorry for the snark - nothing wrong with the essay - I just prefer a plain, unobtrusive style.

kmoser• 1 month ago

Go where it’s new. Build things no one has built yet — things that other people’s workflows can come to depend on. One important rule here: don’t build what can be obtained by burning tokens. Any engineering product that someone has already built and that you can simply have AI clone — one more review bot, one more workflow tool — is not worth your energy, because its acquisition cost has already approached zero. What’s worth building is paradigm-level work: things that, once they exist, change how other people work.

But once you build something new, that people depend on, they will shortly want to move away from that dependency, lest you raise prices or disappear. Even paradigm-level work ends up as tools that can be replicated by other humans, at the cost of a few tokens. That's a difficult dragon to catch and ride successfully.

I think the author had it right when they talked about going deeper into the stack, where we are still loath to deploy AI. The only way to stay ahead of the beast is to do things the beast can't do reliably.

munchler• 1 month ago

Once AI takes everything it can take, what is left for us?

This is a good question, but is perhaps too abstract to address well. I think a better question for right now is:

Once AI generates all the wealth it can generate, who benefits from that wealth?

If the answer is a small number of humans, that is probably a dystopia worth resisting.

If the answer is some number of AI agents, but no humans at all, that is probably also a dystopia worth resisting.

I think the only good outcome is one in which humanity benefits on the whole. If that means that we have to become a post-capitalist society in order to share in the wealth, so be it.

willchis2• 1 month ago

If the answer is a small number of humans, that is probably a dystopia worth resisting.

Have you looked around at the current state of wealth inequality?! The internet (without AI) already did that.

Windchaser3• 1 month ago

There was a really neat article here a while back comparing AI to previous tech/industry revolutions.

The article compared market conditions to argue that the current revolution is similar to the shipping container revolution of the '60s-'80s -- with a lot of market interest and no real moat or market leader, high competition drove prices down, kept margins low, and most of the benefits went to the consumer.

This seems like the best case scenario here. AI ends up expensive to train but cheap to copy and run, so we end up with lots of competitors or even just running it in-house. It's cheap to use, so there'll be lots of businesses trying similar AI-driven ideas and pushing prices of their products down for the consumer.

bananamogul• 1 month ago

These types of posts are tediously regular. Aschenbrenner’s “Situational Awareness” in 2024 [1]. Fraudster Matt Schumer’s “Something Big is Happening” in February [2].

Next viral doom post in September-ish?

[1] https://situational-awareness.ai/

[2] https://lowendbox.com/blog/ai-fraudster-matt-shumer-wrote-so...

paulorlando• 1 month ago

I really liked this quote: “If in the future we write less code and only review, these abilities are hard to train — what do we do?”

That's a different question than the included Luddite example, which I take as "what do we do to prevent change?".

Related, I've been maintaining a list of anti-tech Luddite movements here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M_UjOPxpbKMYes5CcWRW...

Windchaser3• 1 month ago

I think the better Luddite position is "what can we do to protect humans?"

Which can be channeled into making the change healthy.

I heard a statistic that the average QOL and life expectancy didn't increase for most of the Industrial Revolution, once you account for the increase in pollution and disease (disease partly coming from greater urbanization). Yes, our lives are much richer now than they would've been 200 years ago, but it was pretty rough there for a while.

I'd like to think we can do better this time. Though, realistically, I'm not sure. Gilded Age 2.0, coming up

themafia• 1 month ago

My answer: soon. By the end of this year or next, the year after at the very latest.

Which is based on what?

AI can process the entire world

It can process what is in it's training set. Which is a monumental gap to step over. Failing to understand this leads to all kinds of silly predictions and mindless prognostication.

I'd like to see an AI article based on data and not paragraphs of internal monologue spewed out onto the internet.

romaniv• 1 month ago

This "how to adapt" prop-slop is getting tiresome. So much of it is obviously intended to project and demoralize rather than provoke thought or give legitimate advice. The trick of this kind of writing is to skip arguing that something rather questionable will happen and go straight to giving advice about how everyone should adapt to the new, totally inevitable reality. This isn't even a particularly sophisticated method of manipulation.

rayiner3• 1 month ago

AI can’t take away babies, picnics with your spouse, or dipping your toes into the ocean. If it replaces work, then great, that’s the stuff we didn’t need to do anyway.

yacin• 1 month ago

how will you afford that baby, or picnic, or trip to the ocean?

rayiner3• 1 month ago

Easily. People in my dad’s village in Bangladesh have those things.

willchis2• 1 month ago

But what about putting food on the table for your babies and spouse?

lelanthran2• 1 month ago

If it replaces work, then great, that’s the stuff we didn’t need to do anyway.

If that were true, you would have done it (given up working) by now. You haven't, hence it's not true.

rayiner3• 1 month ago

I do it because I believe humans have a moral obligation to power the various cogs of society. If humans are no longer needed to power said cogs, then I no longer need to do it.

torginus2• 1 month ago

Btw, its insane to think imo that a few years from now theres going to be no jobs - AI isnt going to cook food or stack bricks or any number of manual processes - in fact I'd be very happy if AI could just fix software - basically heaps upon heaps of software is just built wrong fundamentally (operating systems, just to give one huge example), and AI productivity could give us a chance to try again and build things the right way.

bayarearefugee3• 1 month ago

Btw, its insane to think imo that a few years from now theres going to be no jobs - AI isnt going to cook food or stack bricks or any number of manual processes

We're all really excited to do those mostly minimum wage jobs. Especially given how much competition there will be for them when the currently non-minimum-wage jobs disappear.

torginus2• 1 month ago

Why would those jobs be minimum wage? Skilled trades often pay as well or better than most desk jobs - which might be a downgrade for a lot of folks here, but the maximalist AI disruption premise is still far from an apocalyptic scenario

_pdp_• 1 month ago

I am absolutely convinced that in just a few years 90% of what we know as the Internet will be AI and possibly there will be an entire new class of economy that is based around these agents.

I can see glimpses of that today but we are a bit too early.

And with that almost all of the software will be written by AI for AI but humans will be in control - I hope :)

kazinator• 1 month ago

Every new model release brings another paradigm shift

It does not; the increments are almost imperceptible now and locked to the same paradigm, whose peak has already gone by.

Fraterkes• 1 month ago

I, everyone here, has read all these discussions a thousand times now. I've tried to have a more nuanced view, I understand the excitement and I think there can be real value in automation being accessible to everyone.

What matters to me is, I like programming and making things, and I'm okay at it. I can learn to enjoy, and get good at, other work (I hope). Close a fairly brief chapter of my life where I felt some certainty about what I wanted to do for the coming decades. But it's maddening to not have any idea if I will need to.

Here's my point: it may not be bad to live in a future world were ai and llm's are very prevelant, ordinary technology. But I think living in the now, while that world is (slowly) being born, can get to be pretty bad.

brap2• 1 month ago

So: after AI takes everything, what remains is not some second-best refuge — it is the place where the sense of value was always meant to live. AI is a receding tide. It washes away all the external anchors we carelessly threw out over the years — title, output, the feeling of being needed — and forces us to swim back to the one center that the tide cannot reach.

Yeah for sure and that’s great and all but I think what they were really asking is how they’ll feed their kids

brap2• 1 month ago

OP after completing this essay https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/240/075/90f...

keybored• 1 month ago

Over the past month I’ve received three letters in a row from strangers — all software engineers I’ve never met. One was a frontend developer in infrastructure, another did data ops, the third was somewhere in between. The three letters look different, but they ask the same question.

Moments where I wonder why this is an apparent people sent me thoughts opinion column while at the same time not caring.

These three questions are, fundamentally, the same question. On the surface it looks like an engineering question, or a career planning question, but underneath it is an existential question: once execution is fully taken over by machines, where does the human stand? Or more bluntly — once AI takes everything it can take, what is left for us?

As we will see later, the answers are just hustlerism.

But that’s very immediate and practical. So why this existential pose?

Because the societal questions have very immediate questions and answers as well if you don’t actively try to obfuscate with philosophical nonsense.

- Who benefits?

- Who will be left standing?

And the answers to those aren’t the machines, unless you’re some ideological cretin who believes in AI takeover while at the same time is working on building AI. They are also people.

And if your doomer narrative has labor of all sort vanishing, and it’s just a matter of time, interspersed with model gooning—who are the h-u-m-a-ns left?

Why hustler on the individual level, philosopher on the societal level?

Later, some of them went out at night and smashed the machines. History calls them the Luddites. People usually treat them as fools who hated technology, but that’s a misreading—

No, it’s an intentional reading. But we’re too busy obfuscating to face obvious facts.

So the real question is not “do you know how to use AI.” People who know how to use it today do hold an advantage over those who don’t, but the half-life of that advantage is maybe a year or two — and at the top of the field, possibly only one or two months. The pressure from each new model generation is mounting; the window for exploration and adaptation gets shorter every time. Every new model release brings another paradigm shift, and the workflow you painstakingly built, the prompting tricks you collected, the engineering scaffolding you accumulated — any of it can become a Spinning Jenny overnight

So what does this afford you in terms of amazing insight?

My only method for dealing with this is what I call end-state thinking: don’t spend yourself on intermediate-state problems. Think and act with the endpoint as the premise.

Platitude nonsense.

Don’t look at the trees. Look at the whole forest.

The threat to the job, the cultivation of the ability, the survival of subjecthood — all of these anxieties collapse, when gathered, into the same thing: we are afraid of losing our sense of value. Afraid that one day we will wake up and find we are no longer useful to this world. Being laid off is just the outer shell of that fear. The core is older: a person’s deepest fear has never been having no job. It is the suspicion that one is no longer worthy.

On the one hand, they say that you will be out of a job in two years time. Forever.

On the other hand, we’re fed this touchy-feely nonsense about going to work. Weird, I thought we were going to be punched in the balls with real materialistic dread, some real labor disciplining that keeps us desperate and fearful, not getting mind-lobbied over how ow-owwy our feelings will be when we are no longer fit to have our labor commodity exploited by billionaires or perhaps trillionaires (who are worthy because they have assets).

So: after AI takes everything, what remains is not some second-best refuge — it is the place where the sense of value was always meant to live. AI is a receding tide. It washes away all the external anchors we carelessly threw out over the years — title, output, the feeling of being needed — and forces us to swim back to the one center that the tide cannot reach.

The destruction of your income is actually withering away at your materialistic fetters that keeps you from spiritual self-realization.

In that old essay I gave that center a definition

How many links of this author are we supposed to have referenced now? I’m imagining a web of nonsense, but I can’t attest to that.

In fact I didn’t read most of this piece.

This year, friends who know me well call me radical: I hand designs to AI, code to AI, review drafts to AI; next I’m preparing to hand over testing too.

Today, the radical is the one who radically builds on non-deterministic foundations.

The real purpose of being radical is one thing only: before the macro trend arrives, keep finding new ground to stand on. All the time AI saves you must flow into growth and exploration — not into more requirements. This is a discipline I set for myself, and a sentence I repeat in every reply: if the dividends of efficiency get eaten entirely by workload, then this revolution is meaningless to the individual.

The real purpose of being a radical is being a bloodless grinder.

Yeah that’s about as much as I expected from someone writing about how a force might wipe out their income. From a software engineering perspective.

To close, I want to return to those Luddites who smashed machines in the night.

Now let’s return to the Luddites and pretend that they were the only ones who rebelled against industrial society and that they only failed. Some real 12-hour days in the factory grindset.

Back to the question in the first letter:

Could not meander more. Or, did you perhaps forget to refer to another essay here?

But the answer to that question doesn’t depend on AI. It depends on where you are standing when that day comes: at the end of the assembly line, stamping approval on the machine’s output with an ever-lower bar, waiting for even the stamping to be optimized away? Or further upstream — where the questions are picked, where the standards are set, where the logic is guarded, where the world is built.

The old school answer was to organize with others. But that was just when most people could get a job, or had to anyway. When labor itself is about to be wiped out? Double down on being a bloodless hustler.

The wind rises in the reeds. The great trend is never some monolith descending from the sky — it is composed of the choices of countless individuals in this very moment. to refuse to lower your standard for the sake of speed, to invest the saved hours into an exploration no one has done before — these tiny decisions are themselves the trend.

Yeah, what do I do when I am the author and think that the inevitability of tech is going to eat my livelihood? What rousing speech to manifest?

The decision you make today to push the logical chain through on paper before opening the chat window,

Beyond embarrassing.

Pick a lane. You can’t scaremonger about AI Inevitability and have a rousing speech about the tiny decisions of Opening the Chat Window.

dmje• 1 month ago

Well I thought this was terrific even if it’s apparently getting panned by HN

pilgrim0• 1 month ago

What I find curious is that a machine replacing manual work is a new device in the environment, but LLMs are not new a device, they’re a feature on the device, the device still is the computer, and the operator is the same. There’s another conflicting angle, which is that LLMs derive from sampled human work and is paid for by wealth generated by human work, so if you discard human work there’s no wealth to maintain the LLMs nor data to feed it. And I don’t really see how can LLMs produce their own wealth nor how it could succeed producing their own samples. Humans and LLMs are natural complements of each other. I cannot rationally see how this development could lead to a complete breakdown of labor economics without the complete breakdown of the technology itself. Furthermore, human cognition, language, culture, philosophy, science, etc evolve at enormous momentum, with basically zero friction, while training of LLMs is insanely costly and slow. Even if it could self improve, it would still be way slower and increasingly costly (dataset only grows). So advancing this technology without restrictions is the recipe for its own demise, for many possible reasons: no one to pay for it, no material to train it, no supply to scale it, etc. That is, its own potential is tightly tied to the potential to starve itself. So the sustainable thing to do is to find a balance. (This is just to talk about general dynamics, not considering particular social, cultural and environmental effects at each point in the evolution curve)

nullbyte• 1 month ago

Great article

HardCodedBias• 1 month ago

The author was so close.

"This gives us the first corollary of end-state thinking — cold but honest: every step that sits between intent and implementation will, by default, disappear."

This is likely correct.

But the author withdraws into thousands of words afterwards about the importance of gatekeeping using their current skills.

I think that is wrong. YMMV.

arty_throwaway• 1 month ago

First thing is that "intent", according to this author, is single-author and monolithic. I'm not sure that's the way it works with any modern codebase of any size. I suppose they were perhaps just thinking about sitting down at a prompt and having a go, but I suspect it's a fiction because what is an LLM if not encoded intent of millions of us, itself running on a codebase of hundreds of authors, itself running on an OS of thousands of authors, etc.

The main move here is hand execution to the machine and keep "choosing what to intend" for the human. Isn't choosing what to intend just...intent? And forming intent is what programmers always do/did. That sounds less like a new refuge, and more like a relabelled part of the job.

More importantly, "intent is implementation" needs intent to be two different things at once. For the slogan to work, the intent at handoff has to be complete enough to determine the system on its own. But Section 4's own recipe is not that. It's hand off a rough idea and let the AI "expand and refine" it. Complete enough to ship, or rough enough to need the machine to finish it? "Intent" can't be both. There's no finished intent at the handoff for the slogan to be true of.

Same problem with the verification argument. Section 1 says nobody needs to read the assembly (personally, I like reading assembly, but I digress). Then Section 2 says the one thing that can't be sped up is verification. The author says it's an economic reality, I would argue it's structural. Verification is expensive because there's no general procedure to confirm an implementation does what you intended! Halting problem, natch. Saying you verified the result doesn't work because that's specific: this time in that environment. Verification keeps dragging back to the code. You can't claim that code loses meaning AND claim that verification is the surviving human job, because verification is the place that code meaning won't go away.

Anyway, there are frameworks that can describe how intent relates to computational process. This blog post isn't one of them.

After AI takes everything

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