I don't see how this follows

not to be offensive, but the idea of an asocial labrador is hilarious

I have the unformed idea that providing a structured interface for the human user overtop the chat interface for the ai, so that the human is not chatting back and forth, could be effective? At least for things that have a structure

Are you comparing the ai ceos to helots? I am confused

The optimistic spin is, I think, software developer as a career dies, just like sysadmin. But just like dev-ops, a new to-be-named role (or set of roles) will arise

> "...software developer as a career dies..."

Web front-end and backend developer as a career dies, probably desktop/mobile application development too. However, some of the more specialized software developer roles are likely to survive; none of the people on the Linux kernel team have anything to worry about and the same goes for the GCC folks.

do you need taste if you can massively parallel a/b test your way to something that is tasteful? say like you take your datacenter of geniuses and have a a rubin-loop supervising testing different directions. shouldn't that be close enough?

"taste" here is an intractable solution. Just take a look at how architecture has varied throughout the history of mankind, building materials, assembly, shape, flow, all of it boils down to taste. Some of it can be reduced to 'efficiency' -- like the 3 point system for designing kitchens, but even that is a matter of taste.

Find three professional chefs and they will give you three distinct visions for how a kitchen should be organized.

The same goes for any professional field, including software engineering.

Can infinite monkeys produce Shakespeare?

It was the best of times. It was the blurst of times.

That approach leads you to products like instagram.

I think they also suddenly had to deal with a bunch of people being mean to them, and telling them they were wrong, which drove them a little mad.

Sort of an oppositional defiant thing, filtered through immense wealth and power

After one becomes wealthy, social media easily becomes the only place where anyone says no to them. When everyone who surrounds you tells you "you're absolutely right, let me get that for you", you atrophy the muscle that let's you course correct when you're making a mistake, and when someone disagrees with you it feels that much stronger.

Wealth is not the only way this can happen, you see it with notoriety and power who have gotten used to " being right" (Dawkins comes to mind), and now this experience is being "democratised" by LLMs.

This. I remember many a time pmarca getting so upset and just blocking everyone who disagreed with him on Twitter. It was the weirdest thing.

Blocking people that annoy him on Twitter is the only humanizing thing about him. Deciding that someone has annoyed you enough on that platform that you don't care to ever hear from them ever again is the only thing that made that platform usable when you have any minimal audience.

"I've known you for all of 10 seconds and enjoyed not a single one of them" followed by blocking is good, actually. That doesn't make you any more correct or wrong, of course.

china benefits from America eroding its global power is what the thesis is, I believe.

Iran being a quagmire that erode's America's global power.

They're gambling basically, if it works and they do topple the regime, I think it will work for the USA, and if it turns into a prolonged quagmire, then yes, it will probably not be successful and very detrimental. I do sympathize with those who just wanted cheaper eggs.

nobody know how to measure software productivity + ai is supposed to mean productivity goes up = more ai means more productivity

As best as I can tell, that's the thinking. It's one number, it's very easy to find and manage, and there is a belief that it directly measures productivity.

I disagree that it does; seems to me the throughput of useful features is a better measure, but I'm not in the drivers seat on this one

Incremental revenue and cost-savings, at least for enterprises, is where it would show up. There’s also a present value consideration - if LLM’s make those dollars come into existence closer to the present, they are worth more.

The personal use case stuff is messy and subjective.

attributing incremental revenue to gross engineering effort is challenging, imo.

Cost savings is primarily a function of headcount here. Which is also easy to measure, and so if we take my thesis that easy to measure stuff is prioritized...

I deeply wish to hear about other tech trends; I get enough of use more ai, do more with less, and ship faster at work. I'd rather hear about new tools and techniques here