"Seam" is an industry standard term coined by Michael Feathers in Working Effectively with Legacy Code.

To call a seam load bearing means it's performing critical work for the dependent class, perhaps a database query.

A seam that is not load-bearing would be something that is just injected for testability - maybe a date provider that provides some constant time to avoid flaky tests.

Tbh, this is quite literally the opposite of vapid. A whole book was written about them and their importance, and how to leverage them.

In my experience, Claude uses the word accurately. Code has a lot of seams, and seams are an important thing to communicate when working with code. Therefore, expect to see the word often.

Personally, I don't mind it at all. I'm glad the industry is finally standardizing our language more. Makes it easier for me to communicate with other engineers.

AI is trained on human intelligence. The hyper-scalers are squeezing every last drop of automatically verified reward, and that may get us very far. A compiler passes or fails in milliseconds for free, forever.

But.. "good design taste" has no compiler.

Of course, taste isn't unverifiable. But it's is expensively verifiable. Noisy, slow, and orders of magnitude lower throughput. People with deep domain knowledge often can't articulate well _why_ one design works and the other doesn't. So, judgment arrives as a verdict, and not a crisp rationale. I guess we'll see if sample efficiency outpaces the cost of human judgement.

In the mean time, leverage will sit with whoever holds this tacit knowledge (incumbents). I.e., hospital systems, law firms, chip designers, studios, SaaS that are dominating their niche.. and not with the labs training on it. To me, this is why valuations of companies like Palantir could potentially make sense.

Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution

Which empowered Congress to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."

Scientists and the artists and their "exclusive rights" have built quite a lot over the centuries.

What this post is actually pointing out is that intellectual property that has transferrable physical representation has more value to the consumer.

And intellectual property that does not have transferable physical representation has more value to the producer.

Reselling or gifting a book you've read to a friend is wholesome.. it feels good. Truly.. but every time we do that we also take from the artist.

We draw the line somewhere because these things that "are the parents' decision" have consequences on broader society. They have consequences that impact you and me. And we also have a say.

You can make the argument that it's just the parents' decision. But you have to say why.

Reality is that was A bottleneck. Code review has historically been faster than writing the code.

That is no longer true for me. I can complete two to three PRs per day in a span of time that would have historically taken one to three days.

I now sit around doing code reviews and asking for code reviews.

Deciding what to build. Reviewing Code. And testing code. Are the new bottleneck.

So of course we don't see massive productivity gains. Because these parts of the SCLC were always bottlenecked but their capacity matched the throughout. We fired all the dedicated QAs years ago. Sr+ engineers that do all the code review are limited.

Teams have not re-organized to match the new code-input velocity.

Engineers don't want to do QA because it's "beneath them".. and most engineers don't like performing or are not Sr enough to do extensive or high quality code review.

In the same way that the sound waves and facial expressions I produce are not conscious, the output json of an LLM is obviously not conscious either.

The locus of consciousness and subjective experience may be in the computer, either at inference time or training time..

Of course, its not that simple. Some companies probably are great at scouting. Yegge mentioned a few ways in the post. Good internship programs, acquihiring, etc.

Some people, perhaps most, will enjoy AI art. Artists are at risk of displacement too.

But a subset of art appreciators hold firm that the creator is an essential aspect of the work, and I don’t see that conviction fading.

How large this subset is, I don’t know. But they also happen to be the world’s tastemakers and trendsetters. Their beliefs largely shape our aesthetic world, so their influence may only grow.

But almost all output outside that space is at risk of AI displacement. Corporations are amoral entities that optimize for profit, and they follow the law only as much as they must.

The law is our collective action. We socially construct what we value. We could fight to preserve the 5-day work week doing what machines can do. But.. I’d rather fight for collective ownership of the machines.