"Please AI lets burn down knowledge work and labor work"

"Let people do old handcraft jobs."

So many presuppositions about what people want to do.

As a child I spent a lot of time programming and doing "knowledge work" because it's fun - I don't enjoy "old hand-crafted jobs". Sure, let's definitely destroy capitalism in it's current state I suppose. But I find people like you who hate knowledge-work/coding and think everyone else must feel the same and only do it for the money a bit out-of-touch.

However, my product is so far removed from anything these companies would make, on top of that I'm using open-source models (e.g., oss gpt 120b is really, really good). I don't use any of the main providers like AWS, etc., and the underlying AI systems are only about 5% of the product. I need it for the idea to work, but it is a tiny part of the full offering. I can't really imagine it would make any sense for Amazon, etc., to compete on something like this.

But yes, in the end, huge conglomerates with infinite money can destroy smaller entrepreneurs - but that's not really any different than it's been for decades pre-AI.

There are a lot of really useful things that were impossible before. But none of these use cases are "easy," and they all take years of engineering to implement. So, all we see right now are trashy, vibe-code style "startups" rather than the actual useful stuff that will come over the years from experienced architects and engineers who can properly utilize this technology to build real products.

I'm someone who feels very frustrated with most of the chatter around AI - especially the CEOs desperate to devalue human labor and replace it - but I am personally building something utilizing AI that would have been impossible without it. But yeah, it's no walk in the park, and I've been working on it for three years and will likely be working on it for another year before it's remotely ready for the public.

When I started, the inference was too slow, the costs were too high, and the thinking-power was too poor to actually pull it off. I just hypothesized that it would all be ready by the time I launch the product. Which it finally is, as of a few months ago.

As long as people comment, "Only bad/stupid engineers hand-write code because LLMs are better in every way," and that's objectively not true in various engineering circles, I'll keep trolling them and being just as hyperbolic in the inverse because it amuses me. Don't take things too seriously on the internet; you'll have a bad time ;)

I ultimately landed on a flag-driven, hierarchical state machine. Instead of implementing a full tree traversal, which requires complex flow control nodes, I use bit flags to define my system's entire set of rulesets or invariants.

A state doesn't need to ask "what do I do next?" but rather "are my activation conditions met?" These conditions are defined as bitwise flags evaluated through standard bit-masking operations (AND, OR, XOR, etc.). For example, a state might only become active if flags IN_RANGE & GOAL_IS_NPC & PATH_BLOCKED. The flags allow me to mathematically encode complex prerequisite combinations as simple integer comparisons.

I found this approach makes the transition logic nice and clean. It shifts the burden from managing the flow (which is complex) to managing the data state (which is simple and deterministic). The system still feels like a full BT - it has hierarchy and sequential logic - but the decision process is purely data-driven, which makes it really easy to reason about even when there's a many of layers of complexity for each state/substate.

I'm going to assume you do the type of engineering where all the hard problems are solved for you already, and you are merely connecting inputs/outputs and hooking up APIs. Because, frankly, the value in "software plumbing" is gone; anyone with a Claude license can do that now.