Nevertheless, VCs are in fact pretty dumb sometimes and it'd be stupid to invest soley based on stars.

All the foundation model breakthroughs are hoarded by the labs doing the pretraining. That being said, RL reasoning training is the obvious and largest breakthrough for intelligence in recent years.

Pre-ChatGPT, in ~2020, there were about 5,000 new packages per month. Starting in 2025 (the actual year agents took off), there is a clear uptick in packages that is consistently about 10,000 or 2X the pre-ChatGPT era.

In general, the rate of increase is on a clear exponential. So while we might not see a step change in productivity, there comes a point where the average developer is in fact 10X productive than before. It just doesn't feel so crazy because it can about in discrete 5% boosts.

I also disagree with the dataset being a good indicator of productivity. I wouldn't actually suspect the number of packages or the frequency of updates to track closely with productivity. My first order guess would that AI would actually be deflationary. Why spend the time to open source something that AI can gen up for anyone on a case by case basis specific to the project. it takes a certain level of dedication and passion for a person to open source a project and if the AI just made it for them, then they haven't actually made the investment of their time and effort to make them feel justified in publishing the package.

The metrics I would expect to go up are actually the size of codebases, the number of forks of projects that create hyper customized versions of tools and libraries, and other metrics like that.

Overall, I'd predict AI is deflationary on the number of products that exist. If AI removes the friction involved with just making a custom solution, then the amount of demand for middleman software should actually fall as products vertically integrate and reduce dependencies.

We can't look for failed replication experiments if none exist.

I hope we are in a similar era with regards to climate change. Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively unlimited renewable energy that literally falls from the sky like manna. With a bit of social pressure we should be able to extinct the fossil fuel industry in my opinion.

I don't know if it got these abilities through generalization or if google gave it a dedicated animated SVG RL suite that got it to improve so much between models.

Regardless we need a new vibe check benchmark ala bicycle pelican.

So we might have an outer alignment failure.

Healthy grandparents that are around to support their children and take care of grandchildren increase the fitness of the entire lineage by helping their children have more children and those grandchildren to be healthier/safer.

I understand stoicism is deeply entwined with modern CBT and the roots can be traced back basically, but why misuse the ancient form when we have decades of evolution and study on CBT?

I'll set a reminder to check back at that time to see who was right.

It's become so repetitive recently. Examples from this post alone:

1. "This isn't about AI. The quality crisis started years before ChatGPT existed."

2. "The degradation isn't gradual—it's exponential."

3. "These aren't feature requirements. They're memory leaks that nobody bothered to fix."

4. "This wasn't sophisticated. This was Computer Science 101 error handling that nobody implemented."

5. "This isn't an investment. It's capitulation."

6. "senior developers don't emerge from thin air. They grow from juniors who:"

7. "The solution isn't complex. It's just uncomfortable."

Currently this rhetorical device is like nails on a chalkboard for me.

Anyway, this isn't a critique of your point. It's pedantry from me. :)