There's the rub: AI is not an oracle. It's neither designed nor intended to provide accurate recall of all facts. It's closer to a reasoning engine than anything IMO.

Oh, and for the record: I don't trust people to get basic facts correct, either. It's already far better than the average human at trivia.

For personal projects that I don't plan to share widely, I'm making it a point to not look at the code at all. So far - and to my surprise - I've not only found that this has result in no more bugs than before, but it seems to result in fewer bugs over time. Every time I find a bug or a regression, I add it to the specification. My SDLC requires that every specification have at least one associated test. Not every function, or every line, or anything like that - every specified feature. The end result has been that my projects have matured over time much faster than if I'd been more closely involved.

I've already toyed with writing some projects in Nim and Haskell for token efficiency. At some point I plan to put together a simple test project, then do a comparison of token efficiency with every language I can think of to find the one that I'm able to generate most quickly, correctly, and cheaply.

Three years ago, AI was barely able to provide sort-of reliable command completion.

Two years ago, it could extrapolate a single function from a docstring - but the docstring had to be so verbose that it wasn't practical to use in that way.

A year ago, I was tinkering with Devin to try to find a way to get it to reliably implement small, isolated features from verbose Jira tickets.

Six months ago, I started using AI to generate the majority of my code output. Most of my time was spent reviewing, and I was ecstatic to reach ~2x output because I could run the next task while reviewing the last.

Now, at work I'm managing a half dozen Claude Code instances, Devin sessions, and orchestrating a review loop between Claude, Devin, and CodeRabbit. It's not uncommon for me to be working on four or more discrete features at once. My output is approximately 15x my pre-AI baseline - and I've not sat down and written a line of code directly in six months.

At home I'm managing a Hermes agent that can spin up a whole fleet of purpose-tuned agents for whatever purpose I'd like. I've implemented spec-driven development a'la Acai, and extended it to the point that my agent creates specs from text or voice conversation, I review them, and it handles implementation end-to-end. The code itself is an almost disposable artifact - useful primarily to ensure no regressions have been introduced between rounds.

... I simply don't understand how you can assert that "it's been basically the same for 3 years". It absolutely has not.

Even small, dumb, local models are excellent at translation already. Frontier models are on par or better than the human translations we've tested them against at work.

While my own views are likely closer to Musk's than I suspect yours are, I share those concerns. I don't think I'd be interested in moving there, at least not in the initial waves.

My optimistic view of the future looks more like "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" than "Total Recall".

Hyperloop and the Vegas Loop are projects used to justify the existence of the Boring Company. The Boring Company's tech is definitely relevant to extraterrestrial habitat creation.

Musk has a singular goal as far as I can tell: to make humanity a multi-planetary species. All of those things are testing the boundaries of what's possible in areas that will or could be very important for building a permanent settlement on Mars.

I posit that while there's much room for debate around whether or not those projects are viable, as far as I can tell everything Musk has done has been in service of building the corporate framework, talent pool, skills, and technology necessary to colonize Mars.

    Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man.

Chad was one of two people who materially impacted my entrance onto the tech/startup in the early 2010s. In particular, he moved heaven and Earth to make sure I got to attend a conference when my employer decided to cancel my tickets shortly before I was planning to leave.

Was this an expected outcome? It doesn’t sound like it, but I’ve not really investigated it deeply.