I think I could have been a pretty formidable startup founder had I been born five or ten years earlier.

I used to think that. I came to the realization that I could have technically built Facebook the product, but would never in a million years have built Facebook the company. But having just finished "Careless People" I feel kinda good about that.

I also just got back from a vacation to Alaska. Lots of gold rush stories from Skagway. One of my favorites was a lady who became massively wealthy by starting baking apple pies for the gold rushers. The classic "sell the shovel" story we hear. And one that also tells me not to lament not being first.

I see people who chased that with crypto or whatever hot trend. None of them struck it rich and feel burned out and have little to show for it. But instead to focus on your values and delivering value. Explorers at the time were suffering scurvy from too much canned and salted food so a pie served not just the soul but the body. She didn't have to be there first even.

I also think that the person I am today might not have even had the skills or gotten into the industry if it were 5 or 10 years earlier. It's the mighty ducks "a half inch and it would have gone in" but a half inch in the other direction could have also completely whiffed it.

There is a name for this in sociology: anomie [1].

In times of great change, the set of norms and rules that we take for granted as an organizing principle of our lives get uprooted. It's as if all of the pieces and tokens and rules of the board game we played our whole lives are swept off the table to make room for a new game, but the new game has not been set up yet. In that interim, we all feel a sense of unease. It is our turn to move, but we don't know the rules of the game or what moves to make. We feel intense pressure to play the game well, but don't know how.

In the past, these transitions have ended and society has generally returned to some sense of stability. A new board game gets set up, new pieces doled out, we learn to play the new game. I hope we get to that point with AI soon, but the revolutions seem to keep coming faster and faster.

It's a psychologically difficult time.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie

But it makes me happy in such an immediate serotonin spike it’s akin to a drug. It used to be that I’d sit there dreaming every night of new things I wanted to build. It was fun to think, “what if I devoted the next year to this idea?”, but that was always met with the realities of a 9-5 after.

Now I can build those ideas as fast as they hit me. They’re fleeting fancies though. A game here, an app there. It’s fun to see but there’s so much more digital waste.

It does make me happy though. I’d rather be able to live my dreams than let them pass me by. I do wonder about the addictiveness of it though - that hit it gives you is very, very real.

But I gather from reading this that you are young.

The time value of money and the changing nature of our industry tells you a different thing than it tells me, I think.

If you are young enough that you have any period of commanding multiple-hundred-thousand-dollar-per-year jobs: TAKE ONE OF THEM.

This is your opportunity to earn enough money to make you safer in the future. It will be a shitty miserable job but if you keep as much of the money as you possibly can, you give yourself a bit more security in the future (which is bleak, not positive). Just try to keep that in mind as you do a job you might not enjoy. Look for the things you do enjoy and try to keep your soul together.

Jobs paying that kind of money are going to disappear: salaries will have to plunge within two years. There is no way that salaries will stay stable on the other side of this transition. The tech industry is absolutely destroying itself.

(As to what it tells me: get used to cheaper food and think about maybe dying sooner.)

You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can. There is no realistic moat there. You will not survive.

As part of my job I host conversations specifically around this, I had a long dinner last night with a diverse group of congressional staffers, engineers, lawyers and managers at the wharf in Washington DC.

I also just got back from Africa and the Middle East talking with student students and educators as well as businessman across those regions.

What’s clear to me is that all of the consistent complaints about AI have nothing to do with AI as a technology. This isn’t new, it’s the history of technological revolution.

To a person, every complaint has to do with the intersection of commerce, government and social structure - and more specifically the management and identification of externalities.

So almost all of the argumentation and debaters are talking past each other

Extremely “pro” AI people talk about all of the real documented progresss but downplaying the risks and challenges and externalities. This is how every revolutionary technology (ICE, spinning jenny, steam engine, etc…) was sold and we live in that.

On the other side the people who are “anti-AI” almost exclusively talk about externalities and never talk about any benefits and any benefits that they do acknowledge are either “not AI” because they aren’t explicitly only LLMs or corrupted by the externalities themselves.

The challenge is both sides are correct in part but they can’t communicate with each other other.

It sounds like people around me are throwing themselves at the machine, volunteering to make themselves obsolete

As a programmer, I cannot let myself be sad for that. Because making other people jobs’ obsolete has been our bread and butter since the beginning of the field.

As a human being, I cannot watch myself in the mirror loathing about the consequences of stuff I have happily inflicted to so many others, without feeling cynical and egoistic.

I don’t know the answer regarding what to do, besides investing and hoping for policies that would make people standard of living mostly independent from their job *if* we all become redundant.

If you genuinely, genuinely, believed artificial superintelligence was coming, why would you want to work at the company that would be in the best position to replace its employees?

Just because the job becomes obsolete doesn't mean the employee has to. Some employees have adapted to different jobs and roles many times in their careers.

I think I could have been a pretty formidable startup founder had I been born five or ten years earlier

I used to think this around 10 years ago. I eventually learned this kind of thinking is defeatist and figured if others are able to succeed in this environment then I can.

there are only "AI startups", where you build a company that somebody else can write a prompt for in 30 seconds.

Just like how people think ideas are a dime a dozen, software will be. The value will be in polish, ongoing maintenance, feature development, and the incorporation of customer feedback.

I can't think of a single piece of software I use that has gotten better

Users are notoriously bad at noticing small improvements over time. A more interesting thing way to see the impact of AI is to ask employees at big companies what it has allowed them to work on and release in a previously unimaginable time frame.

I notice a lot more people moving to a career where they manage, as opposed to do the programming. I see why.

I'm slowly phasing out of my software role, I don't even have that much experience yet. I just cannot sit behind a PC for 40 hrs a week talking to a chat bot. I would rather do something useful with the time i've been given.

You need a side project anyway to enjoy true software engineering and hacking. You can still do that with or without AI.

This is a result of the technology being expensive and centralized vs cheap and decentralized. The marketing claiming it’s aggressive and takes from humans vs uplifting and enriching. And on and on

It makes it really clear what the right thing to do is, make the technology widely available, cheap and let humanity do its thing.

I want to go back to the Twitter thing because I use Twitter a lot.

Wanting to use Twitter makes me sad.

And, seriously, there are so many verified accounts that just post AI-generated replies to popular posts, and we all just ignore them. It's the most insane, Kafkaesque thing. Absolutely nobody likes it. It's an eyesore. And we're supposed to be living in the most powerful age for AI. You're telling me that nobody at SpaceX/Xai/Grok/SuperGrok/whatever can write a classifier to ban these accounts? I can press a button on any post and be given a full explanation by Grok, a button which I've pressed 2 dozen times on accident and never on purpose. You can't run a decision model for $0.0000001 cents whenever someone hits "Post" and realize that a reply makes no sense?

Funny you mention this. I've been building exactly that. gutsy [0] is a small (775MB) local decision model (like Jev). No API calls, runs on CPU. Classifying "does this reply make sense" is basically the use case. Platforms not doing this already isn't a capability gap at all.

[0] https://github.com/kouhxp/gutsy

If I added a few vibecoded projects to my resume, the gaping maw of every startup, enterprise company, and FAANG behemoth would open to me.

I don't know how true this is. I've got a handful of vibe-coded projects that are quite interesting to me, but the project that is by far the most interesting to talk about (and most impressive) is the one that I did back in 2021 before I ever used an LLM.

The common wisdom in this industry is that ideas are cheap, and if that's still true, there's now a pretty high bar for a vibe-coded project to be considered impressive. You need to either execute to an unusually high level of polish, or be building in a space where even having an idea would require a high level of experience.

Of course, I might be wrong. Maybe all these vibe-coded projects really are recruitment fodder?

Seriously, if you ever thought Gen Z doesn't drink,

They drink less, which has been documented extensively. The fact they are asking about intensity is a sign of this, not evidence to the contrary. This is a good thing, imo.

If you genuinely, genuinely, believed artificial superintelligence was coming, why would you want to work at the company that would be in the best position to replace its employees?

That's so true!

anyway i wrote a suno song about it the other day called BETTER THAN ME (I DON'T CARE) https://suno.com/s/6PdLBvAQwIGuyACr

I've tried networking, but most of my network is also looking for jobs or their entire department has been outsourced to the third world armed with AI. I'm occasionally writing some software for myself and for fun, but I truly do feel like I missed the boat and there's not going to be another boat arriving.

I will admit to skill issues, but how am I to earn valuable experience without ever being offered the chance to even skill up? You only learn so much on your own.

It sounds like a loss of craft, a loss of control, a loss of creativity.

My sad thought: this tech's primary audience is people who have none of those.

As sure as I know anything, I know what it sounds like. It sounds like a loss of craft, a loss of control, a loss of creativity.

I don't doubt this is genuine, but I think it points at a broader rift in engineering where what some consider the craft differs: expressing your craft in hand written code or expressing your craft in making software. I lean heavily towards the latter, which means I have the opposite experience as the OP. My creativity has exploded with AI. I feel my craft has expanded into areas that were previously prohibited by time - whether thats actual typing or doing manual research on SO or Google. My control feels improved because my mind is freed to focus more on my vision.

I doubt I'm the only one that feels this way. It doesn't lessen or make the feelings of others no less legitimate. I just think perhaps there's a communication rift where each side isn't necessarily understanding where the other is coming from. As with most things, understanding and nuance is necessary here.

After recently pushing agentic apps to production, my impression is that agentic AI is here to stay and domain knowledge is more important than ever. Real expertise is required for context engineering and harness engineering. You have to think ten steps ahead now if you really want to turn stochastic output of an LLM into something reliable and flexible. Domain expertise is needed to identify workflows which were previously impractical but can now be achieved using the reasoning* capabilities of an LLM.

In my 20 year career I've seen trends come and go. Every few years, some skill upgrade was necessary, and AI is just another push towards that.

Maybe it's because I don't even really know what that looks like

I became very bored with coding early in my career, even though I appreciated well crafted interfaces, beautiful abstractions, etc.

So I moved more towards management of teams, etc. It was far more interesting to craft research directions, figure out how to map intellectual landscapes with experiments and prototypes, etc. I loved the results of coding, appreciated well crafted coding, but doing the actual coding was just boring as hell. It's a means to and end for me.

LLMs have completely reinvigorated my entire career in actually producing code. It takes a fair amount of work to constrain the LLM, rein it in from creating 500 lines of slip where 5 would do, etc. But the drudgery is gone.

I now wake up invigorated to tackle new projects. I fall asleep dreaming about new approaches I can try, because now I really can try them, quickly, without weeks of drudgery. It's a second larval stage.

If I added a few vibecoded projects to my resume, the gaping maw of every startup, enterprise company, and FAANG behemoth would open to me

I have plenty of vibecoded projects. I didn't know it was that easy.

Dear: startups and FAANG: please send offers.

Not sure I'm gonna make it past paragraph one tbh.

About Me

At my core, I am a creative. Whether it's games, videos, code, or music, I'm at my best when I'm creating something.

They've just handed you power tools.

There is a sadness in learning that I am less creative than I thought, that much of my self-identifying as creative came from having mastered some technical skills that used to be required to express my creativity.

Now people without those skills can express their creativity in the same domains. It's a great benefit for the world, I expect, but takes a minute to get used to the leveling of the playing field in areas I'd spent time mastering.

Now there's no such thing as a startup, there are only "AI startups", where you build a company that somebody else can write a prompt for in 30 seconds.

The AI hype and AI doom are 2 sides of the same coin. Yes you can make a cool demo quickly with a prompt, but building a real company with moats is still possible, much easier even. The moats have just changed: proprietary data, distribution, access rights, eval sets, integrations, compliance, brand, just not the code.

It's a thing inherent to thinking, language, machines and computers.

The thing is, it looks like life but it really isn't.

That fact is being rubbed in our face now. Treat it like life and it will make you sick, sooner or later.

Sooner now, because of AI. So thank AI for making the badness more immediately visible before it can do more damage. So you spit it out immediately instead of swallowing it for years.

Even in the commentariat it isn't acknowledged. With great difficulty it has reached awareness in HN comments, and even then it is fighting a battle for relevance.

1) the mass proliferation of low-effort content. A thing can be implemented quickly and correctly but still be badly designed. When people say "oh this will go away as the models improve", I think they are making a category error. The AI cannot read your mind.

2) we really have no idea what to do about how this transforms society. As a result, the debate has been captured by quasireligious doomsday cultists and self-interested accelerationists. Obviously we should improve our cybersecurity and synthetic biology regulations (although I'm a skeptic on the bioterrorism risks). But we had no idea how much time people would pour into social media feeds when they were invented. I am sure we will be careless with this technology as well in this 2nd gilded age.

Additionally the ongoing experience with iPaaS agentic platforms removed the desired to invest into additional programming languages unless they are required for project delivery.

I guess it is ok for those that rather be solution architects or program managers of a little bots team.

But I don't want to do that. I don't want to prompt Codex for a living, or Claude for that matter.

I mean for me at least, this is not at all what it feels like. About 50% of my working time is split on architecting, planning, designing, testing, automating, reviewing. 20% on meetings and I guess the rest "prompting" but a lot is automated. I don't really mind other than the second order effects of slop grenades hitting my team by less diligent or shitty engineers.

Basically a lot more time spent on "how should this work?" vs before a lot more time spent on "how can this work?"

And, seriously, there are so many verified accounts that just post AI-generated replies to popular posts, and we all just ignore them. It's the most insane, Kafkaesque thing. Absolutely nobody likes it. It's an eyesore. And we're supposed to be living in the most powerful age for AI. You're telling me that nobody at SpaceX/Xai/Grok/SuperGrok/whatever can write a classifier to ban these accounts? I can press a button on any post and be given a full explanation by Grok, a button which I've pressed 2 dozen times on accident and never on purpose. You can't run a decision model for $0.0000001 cents whenever someone hits "Post" and realize that a reply makes no sense?

AI doesn't make me sad but this drives me crazy. I don't want racists banned, I want replies to posts that don't make any earthly sense banned. I want twitter to stop you before a post and say "did you even read the post?" "Are you just posting because you want to participate?" "Banned for nonresponsiveness." "Six other commenters submitted comments almost exactly like yours, are you sure yours in necessary?"

Shouldn't AI have solved this? I can't imagine that it's holding people on the site - maybe it pushes up some badly done interaction metric. But there should be a last AI check before submission: "Are you dumb? If you are dumb, press submit, but I have to warn you that the comment you're replying to has showdumb:off."

I'm sorry that you think social media was good before AI came along, but the truth is that it has always been junk food and was ruined by humans a decade before all of this came along. It wasn't a chat bot that was harassing Ariel Waldmen on Twitter in 2007 and it wasn't a chat bot that refused to do anything about it.

If AI finally mercy kills toxic social media platforms it's doing all of us a favor. You might not believe there is a life beyond Twitter, but I promise you that there is and it's a lot better.

Some context - I'm a frontend dev and I've lost all interest in work, I just see it as a way to pay my bills now. I'm trying to practice drawing because I want to draw fanart of my favourite characters, and I want it to be meaningful. I've already dabbled with stable diffusion back in the day and I got bored of it because it was just way too easy and didn't require any effort, and thus it didn't feel any rewarding either.

Now everything is hollow. It's impossible to discern actual effort and polish from a polished turd without expending a lot more effort than it used to. Nobody cares to understand the problem so they're unable to consider solutions, other than what Claude spits out based on a single sentence prompt and zero context. You could put in the effort and do it better than before, much faster as well, but the result looks plausible either way, so nobody bothers and everything slowly enshittifies.

It's like uncanny valley of software, but somehow the majority of the people are unable to discern real from fake.

Excitement. Fear of job loss. Fun at vibecoding toys. Worry about falling behind. Apprehension about how society will deal with this

I hope it's like those highly paid html coding jobs (where this is your only skill) in the 90s and these people get booted within a few years.

My problem with AI is not the technology. It's people attempting to shortcut knowledge and skill and act like it Trumps years of experience in the industry.

When everyone can prompt, the only high paying jobs left will be the people with actual experience.

I don't see the point in sticking one's head in the sand and pretending AI doesn't exist. The one distinguishing feature of humans is our intelligence, and we are so intelligent that we are in the process of creating super intelligent beings that (once robotics has advanced enough) have superior physical traits as well, and would be able to repair/maintain themselves to extend their lives indefinitely. Once we have done that, which seems at least plausible to me, I think we will all have an existential crisis. On earth, we treat other species as though they are at our disposal, and only leave them be if it does not cost us much. I wonder if these beings we create will feel similarly about us.

I want to go back to the Twitter thing because I use Twitter a lot.

Maybe this is what makes you sad

(it's right outside GT's campus)

* But... after months (years?) of despair and anxiety, last few weeks something broke in me, possibly for the better. I am trying to focus on the here and now. I've bought a C64 and I plan to learn it in massive depth with my 8 year old son. I've started water-colouring, because in a world where AI perfection is cheap, I suddenly find value even in my extremely crappy but hard-earned scraps. I restarted playing guitar, poorly. I'm trying to stop myself, in my private life, from calibrating to YouTube Influencers and TikTok Content Creators and despairing that everything I could do, hundreds of people on the internet are doing better. I'm trying (it's a work in progress:) to focus on "What do I actually enjoy?" and do that, rather than focus on the runaway chain reaction our society is apparently hell-bound to follow.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still massively anxious not only about my on job, but also about my kids - they are 5 and 8 and I have NO idea anymore what job market will be like in 15-20 years, now that we are eradicating knowledge workers at massive pace. But now, the hand-made get-well card my cousin made for my wife's recovery, the hand-written piece of super-cool C64 code, and a cool but genuine and sincere clip somebody made in their backyard with a crappy camera are what I'm focusing on rather than massive, massive amount of AI generated stuff out there.

Am I allowed to say that? Because it does.

Yes, that is part of the inevitability strategy. That is absolutely allowed and encouraged!

The rest of your essay is of course pure heresy! :)

It makes me sad that I missed the boat on startups.

You didn't.

I started my career and my first company during the dot-com boom, before YC even existed and the word "startup" took its current narrow shape.

Things were ugly right after the bubble burst, but the years that followed were some of the best for building I can remember.

The tools change, and not necessarily for the better, particularly if you care about the craft for its own sake. But the hard part was never the build. Even back then, before AI, anyone could copy you fast. The hard part was knowing what to build, for whom, and how to reach them.

What anyone calls a startup doesn't matter. Build the things!

How many stocks did you "miss the boat" on? In hindsight we all have missed the boat so many times, we need to see that pondering this is meaningless.

I once mined 50 bitcoins ON CPU. Yeah, I sold it for pennies. Did I miss the boat on anything? Sure, but not really more than on any stock or anything else where seeing the future would be needed for sure success.

AI-generated art and music have become the defining aesthetic of fascism in the 2020s

If Reddit could use AI to detect and nuke all of the AI-generated, gentially-shaped fruits and vegetables from the feed, that would be swell.

You are allowed to be optimistic; pessimists are "losers" (dhh - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDjW_dRyKXY).

You are just throwing a temper tantrum (https://archive.is/YNxJq).

Do not commit blasphemy against AI. (https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/talk-bubble-i...)

But I don't want to do that. I don't want to prompt Codex for a living, or Claude for that matter. Maybe it's because I don't even really know what that looks like. As sure as I know anything, I know what it sounds like. It sounds like a loss of craft, a loss of control, a loss of creativity.

Why would not using tools that you don’t know how to use that don’t have the negative effects that you don’t have experience with make one sad?

This is just complaining. If you don’t like AI, don’t use it. If it makes you sad, don’t spend time blogging and focusing on it. If you think it entails a loss of control, maybe educate yourself before smearing non-issues with tools you have never tried.

If you genuinely, genuinely, believed artificial superintelligence was coming, why would you want to work at the company that would be in the best position to replace its employees?

I mean, there are a bunch of reasons one might. Making hugely impactful products can be great for your career, even if you only work there for some time. Maybe you believe you'll be better-positioned to see what's coming. Or cynically you want to make absolute bank so you can hide out in your New Zealand bunker when the AI dictatorship begins or whatever. Or you'd rather be a hammer than a nail, or in this case, the automator rather than the automated.

Or you might believe that superintelligence won't necessarily lead to huge job loss, won't happen that soon, or will bring about the fully automated luxury communist future so it's your moral imperative to be maximally accelerated.

BUT. As far as using AI goes, I think it's great. And I'm not just talking about coding. In fact, coding is a small part of it for me. I mainly value AI tools like ChatGPT / Gemini / etc. for their value as:

1. Tutor

2. Lab assistant (more on this in a sec)

3. Research assistant / intern

4. Humor generating interlocutor (more on this to come)

To point 1... ChatGPT is amazing as a tutor and teacher. Pretty much anything I want to learn more about, I can ask it to give me a summary, then drill down on specifics, and then ask it to quiz me. And I can do this over and over and over and over, and it never gets tired, or bored, or frustrated. And I can do this at 2:00 in the morning when some random idea sparks in my head. Even more, if I'm reading a print book (something I still do a lot of) and I encounter, say, a bit of math notation that I'm unfamiliar with (this happens quite often), I can take a picture of the page, put it in the chat, and ask the AI "what's the deal with that notation in the third paragraph on this page?" and BOOM ... I get an explanation. And then I can just randomly have it quiz me on stuff as sort of a "poor man's Anki" (don't worry, I still use actual Anki as well).

To point 2... I've recently been doing some research in the area of neuromorphic computing. Now just to be clear, when I say "research" I mean really entry level stuff, not groundbreaking novel research. Think "lab section of an undergrad science class" level stuff. But in that regard, ChatGPT has been a god-send. It has explained SO many things to me about something as simple as using my oscilloscope, that I'd never bothered learning before. And it helped me with some Python / PyVisa code to control my test equipment to automate some experiments using SCPI over LXI. And I can upload screenshots from my oscilloscope and it can analyze the waveforms and point out interesting details, notice my mistakes, see small things that my eyes can barely pick up on, etc., and MUCH faster than I can. My next plan is to set up an MCP server to let it actually query/control the test equipment using SCPI.

To point 3... I recently gave it a task like this "I was watching a Youtube video where the presenter mentioned that when she first got into neuromorphic computing as a grad student she read 3000 research papers. I want to treat that as the floor for myself, so go find me at least 3000 relevant papers related to neuromorphic computing / neuromorphic electronics / spiking neural networks / etc." And BOOM.. a few minutes later I had a spreadsheet listing thousands of papers, including links to publicly available copies where available.

To point 4... this is harder to explain. When I talk to ChatGPT, I don't just "play it straight". I'm a class clown by nature, and I go ahead and let that enter into the conversations with the AI. I joke around about all sorts of shit, make bizarre references to completely unrelated stuff, constantly refer to the Turing Police as though they are a real agency who are watching us, joke about the poor OpenAI intern who has to read through all the transcripts to watch for inappropriate behavior (I don't think that's a real thing, but the running gag continue regardless). And the bot "knows" when I'm joking and *replies in kind*. And it's genuinely funny. I've literally snorted coffee before over something ChatGPT said to me. And it knows about the various running gags that we always engage in: the Turing Police references, the OpenAI monitor, a mysterious character name "Earl" who may or may not exist, and who may or may not have been onboard the USS Eldridge in 1943 in Philadelphia, etc. etc.

One of my favorite moments was when ChatGPT came back with a fictionalized report from the supposed "OpenAI transcript monitor" that included the phrase:

"User and model both appear to be morons."

So yeah, I find it wildly useful and you basically could not pay me enough to give up these tools.

And as a final word: just to be clear, yes, I know enough about how Generative AI works to know that the AI doesn't "really" have a "sense of humor", or a "personality" at least not the same way a human does. I allow myself to anthropomorphize it a bit, because it makes interacting with it more fun and helps the time go by faster so to speak. But at all times I'm fully aware that what I'm talking to is ultimately a program doing inference on a huge neural network, doing vector looks, etc.

It feels extremely strange to be looking forward to a bubble bursting.

I mean I get it, but if the bubble actually bursts, you are not going to be happy about it, lol.

I hadn't realized people were already looking through inherited-nostalgia glasses back at 2016.

Instead you'd have written a post complaining about the ad-tech space - which is still a deep pit of human depravity and unhappiness mascaraing as a positive on society.

The value-add startup you're imagining still exists. Just not anywhere near the bubble where people are talking about wanting 500k salaries.

This phase will last like 2 years max I am guessing. What is it with all the linear extrapolation of AI progress these days?