I find AI to feel real nice for pushing delight like this further than I used to have time for as it was never a priority.

It makes no sense to cut off the hand that saves you even as a rich billionaire who wants to control people in a fascist society.

Then have inference go down to the next layer to use those models as a P2P decentralized network.

Maybe like open router could tap federation networks.

I think of AI agents as a factory unlock too.

Anything of quality needs inspection, review, and so on before you ship it. The human in the loop step is critical for value delivery.

Many software companies don't think of themselves as factories but they ship a product to a million customers and it solves a work unit of value for each customer.

Now AI agents may eventually reach a similar potential where many kinds of work can be manufactured by an agent.

The difference I think we are saying as engineers is shipping code isn't the unit of value if you want to turn a code agent into a code factory. It's just a byproduct of the value. Code is the liability, tool, or contract to delivering the value. Poor engineering results in poor output that cannot scale or poor quality that no one wants.

Without us inspecting and reviewing the output you risk the value not being delivered. Also without us, in the past you don't have a factory to begin (although vibe coding has collapsed how soon people can setup a software factory now), scaling it takes engineering effort. We build the factory and also ensure it is operating well to deliver that value to customers.

The ability for a program for loop to do a million iterations is foundational to our knowledge. AI agents just scale that up and is one of the tools we use to get there.

I'm not scared of agents making code cheap. I just see them as another tool in the arsenal to build scalable systems now. Yes some people don't need to scale and some don't need anything of quality. That's fine and is welcomed to improving people's lives. If they want to scale or need a quality factory line they come to us to deliver that still.

I think it's myopic to think this isn't coming. But it's also short sighted to assume our value is gone at building, shipping, and operating factories.

I let my oldest daughter at 10 watch stuff there a couple times a week which she largely watches Minecraft videos. I know everything she consumes for now.

Eventually that will stop and she's on her own when she is more responsible as an older teenager but the important point here is this isn't helicopter parenting, it's survival at protecting her brain from dopamine overload making her a content addict.

I don't want to go full Amish as I think it's important to prepare our kids for the inevitable world they will be exposed too but I feel I'd fail them letting them loose.

The only hope here is China floods the market which would be a good or bad thing however you look at it.

I found AI to be pretty bad with like a bare bones code base without solid patterns in place already. It works but it's just monolithic files galore. use effects hooks everywhere. Nasty state situations with poor data practices. Security vulnerabilities up the wazoo.

It's weird to have this conversion with them. Like yeah your code works but it's so tangled up it's hard to reason about where to start to begin to unwind it all sometimes.

It can be done but cleaning up someone else's slop is the exact reason why I hate AI. It was hard enough to review great code and be critical, honest, and fair but we knew it was an essential part of the process, helped build shared understanding, and was a way to learn from one another.

Whereas throwing in jumbled garbage to review just feels like a waste of our brain cells we spent decades earning by embracing the craft.

But to your point, that is exactly how American companies like to play now. No one is stopping them from screwing over the consumer.

I have a Micron near me and they are building another chip facility but we are years away still so I suspect China will beat them to the punch.

It is not great at decision making or judgment calls that don't have a well defined spec or plan in place yet; like unofficial or unapproved tokens if you will. A lot of this stuff simply never has had specs as it has been internal to how companies work and their secret sauce.

The closest thing we have are governance and compliance policies due to legal/business needs requiring it so it's far more well documented than operational ones in how we work. It is more about the how versus the what here I guess is what I'm saying.

But yeah this is why it does great when there are tests, design systems, evals, and other artifacts to mirror. Far more reckless and unpredictable without these things, but still great for exploration and finding the data output you seek.

My hope is eventually open source models get far enough along we just train the models on company specific code needs.

Until then it is a lot of wack a mole with skills, hooks, system prompts, and interweaving deterministic needs.

Who protects the consumer when they have been gutted of any power?

So while AI will change the industry I don't see any reputable company firing the smartest ones in the room for junior level intelligence.

Even with it advancing someone has to be responsible for when it screws up which we know it will.

It feels bad because I know your team was working so hard pre AI to make state machines more accessible and bring such a powerful concept to the world.

I know it didn't pan out exactly, but I really want durable execution state machines that exceed workflows one day.

I keep thinking to myself can I enforce my AI layer to have some deterministic durable state machine running it and I'm not deep enough on them from a creator/author perspective to answer that question like you, but keep us posted on the changes.

I often have my AI code output one just to make sure my logic feels more sound. Along with mermaid charts if I need to toy around or drop into stately for more power.

Having visual understanding of state is becoming increasingly important for AI generated code you don't nearly understand as well as the human variety.

It seems many still favor store based reactivity state in frontend frameworks.

I contribute to it being the default so why change and because libraries like xstate are far more difficult to learn the syntax and are more verbose. But with AI that's hardly an issue, so I wonder if there is more to it I don't see and we just haven't seen the state chart reach it's peak yet.

Contrast that to what GitHub did which was to pause new customers to ensure quality remained and things were stable.