"If only I had an agent which does everything at work for me". The logical continuation would be 'then I wouldn't have to work', right ?

No. Just as with coding agents, it doesn't mean less work - it means a lot more work of a different kind with the main challenge - don't loose your mind when managing the outputs from these agents.

Look at it another way - if these agents work perfectly and really increase productivity and profits and companies agentify all of their processes/development - then won't these companies essentially become extensions of OpenAI and not the other way around ?

But this comfort has a price, described in the article. It's huge. It's also not static, it's growing and accelerating. Our children will have to pay these bills in one way or another.

What I do with my life (or you with yours) has zero consequence on this, the process can't be stopped. But it will one day, because math.

I didn't write that to shame anyone. I happen to like my life in the city with all the negatives.

But sometimes I think about this - is all this 'comfort' worth the destruction of nature ?

Yeah, there are more places to enjoy yourself and have fun, more entertainment.

I'm passionate about going out to clubs, electronic music events, concerts, restaurants, flying around on a plane or driving my car on the endless roads.

All of this is great, but according to TFA and my own experience, we're absolutely shitting on the natural world to have our nice drink or exotic food which will be gone from our system in 12h.

We've 'borrowed' from the future generations to have our fun and I'm not sure it's all worth the price.

They had a big house, land, clean air, clean water and they were healthy. They celebrated the holidays, had many friends, went to church, weddings, funerals, etc. Villagers always greeted them and stopped for a quick chat when they met on the street.

Now compare with life in a big modern city.

I design complicated distributed systems using AI in order to provide shelter and food for myself. Those are tools which other people use to achieve their goal of providing shelter and food for themselves.

Tons of cars, the air is polluted, constant noise, fake bling, restaurants selling food at 20x price, stressed, depressed, lonely people. Each in their own digital rabbit hole on their phones all the time. Smiles for money only.

I'm really struggling to understand what we've grown into and why this rat race is considered 'better' than what people have had for millennia without destroying nature in the process.

I had to stop doing this because it greatly slowed down and confuse the model, when it did a repo search and found results in some old md files. Plus token usage went through the roof. So keeping changes in the open like that in the repo doesn't work.

Not sure how tfa works, but hopefully the model doesn't see that data.

'Nuclear Launch detected'.

The difference is that in gambling 'the house always wins', but in our case we do make progress towards our goal of conquering the world with our newly minted apps.

The situation where this comparison holds is when vibe coding leads nowhere and you don't accomplish anything but just burn through tokens.

Software engineers work on Jira tickets, created by product managers and several layers of middle managers.

But the power of recent models is not in working on cogs, their true power is in working on the entire mechanism.

When talking about a piece of software that a company produces, I'll use the analogy of a puzzle.

A human hierarchy (read: company) works on designing the big puzzle at the top and delegating the individual pieces to human engineers. This process goes back and forth between levels in the hierarchy until the whole puzzle slowly emerges. Until recently, AI could only help on improving the pieces of the puzzle.

Latest models got really good at working on the entire puzzle - big picture and pieces.

This makes human hierarchy obsolete and a bottleneck.

The future seems to be one operator working on the entire puzzle, minus the hierarchy of people.

Of course, it's not just about the software, but streams of information - customer support, bug tickets, testing, changing customer requirements.. but all of these can be handled by AI even today. And it will only get better.

This means different things depending on which angle you look at it - yes, it will mean companies will become obsolete, but also that each employee can become a company.

It is highly unlikely that the hardware which makes LLMs possible would have been developed otherwise.

Isn't that amazing ?

Just like internet grew because of p*rn, AI grew because of video games. Of course, that's just a funny angle.

The way I see it, AI isn't accidental. Its inception has been in the first chips, the Internet, Open Source, Github, ... AI is not just the neural networks - it's also the data used to train it, the OSes, APIs, the Cloud computing, the data centers, the scalable architectures.. everything we've been working on over the last decades was inevitably leading us to this. And even before the chips, it was the maths, the physics ..

Singularity it seems, is inevitable and it was inevitable for longer than we can remember.

There's this interesting arc of growth for apps which are successful. At first users love it, company grows, founders get rich, they hire expensive people to develop the product and increase revenue until eventually the initial culture and mission is replaced by internal politics and processes.

Software starts getting features which users don't want or need, side effects of the company size and their Q4 roadmap to 'optimize' revenue|engagement|profits|growth|...

Users become tools in the hands of the app they initially used as a tool. This model worked well so far and built some of the biggest companies in history.

AI could make this business model less effective. Once a piece of software becomes successful and veers off into crap territory, people will start cloning it, keeping only the features that made that software successful initially. Companies who try to strong arm their users will see users jump ship, or rather, de-board on islands.

At least I hope this will be the case.

From the tools which were used to design and develop the models (programming languages, libraries) to the operating systems running them to the databases used for storing training data .. plus of course they were trained mostly on open source code.

If OSS didn't exist, it's highly unlikely that LLMs would have been built.

Where `:people` is a key in a huge (larger than memory) map. This database will only touch the referenced nodes when traversing, without loading the whole thing into memory.

So the 'query language' is actually your programming language. To the programmer this database looks like an in-memory data structure, when in fact it's efficiently reading data from the disk. Plus immutability of course (meaning you can go back in history).

People use software for specific features, but most software have lots of features people never use or need. A lot of modern software is designed to handle lots of users, so they need to be scalable, deployable, etc.

I don't need any of that. I just need the tool to do the thing I want it to do. I'm not thinking about end users, I just need to solve my specific problem. Sure there might be better pieces of software out there, which do more things. But the vibe coded thing works quite well for me and I can always fix it by prompting the model.

For example, I've vibe coded a tool where I upload an audio file, the tool transcribes it and splits it into 'scenes' which I can sync to audio via a simple UI and then I can generate images for each scene. Then it exports the video. It's simple, a bit buggy, lacks some features, but it does the job.

It would have taken me weeks to get to where I am now without having written one manual line of code.

I need the generated videos, not the software. I might eventually turn it into a product which others can use, but I don't focus on that yet, I'm solving my problem. Which simplifies the software a lot.

After I'm finished with this one, I might generate another one, now that I know exactly what I want it to do and what pitfalls to avoid. But yeah, the age of industrial software is upon us. We'll have to adapt.

The situation is far from similar now. Now there's an app for everything and you must use all of them to function, which is both great and horrible.

From my experience, current generation of AI is unreliable and so cannot be trusted. It makes non-obvious mistakes and often sends you off on tangents, which consumes energy and leads to confusion.

It's an opinion I've built up over time from using AI extensively. I would have expected my opinion to improve after 3 years, but it hasn't.

At the same time, a million people talk to chatgpt about suicide each week, there's an epidemic of loneliness, mental health issues, wars, famines, pollution, climate change and the list goes on.

Work is not just about earning wages. A lot of people find a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging, community, pride and joy in the work they do. For many it's also about the hierarchy, the title, the career ladder, etc.

I for one don't see how more automation / tech is going to fix the fundamental problems that the previous waves of automation have left behind.

Or lose control of the codebase, which you no longer understand after weeks of vibing (since we can only think and accumulate knowledge at 1x).

Sometimes the easy way out is throwing a week of generated code away and starting over.

So that 3x doesn't come for free at all, besides API costs, there's the cost of quickly accumulating tech debt which you have to pay if this is a long term project.

For prototypes, it's still amazing.