> A boom in railroad construction, 33,000 miles (53,000 km) of track were laid across the country between 1868 and 1873.

> The railroad industry was the largest employer outside of agriculture and involved large amounts of money and risk. A large infusion of cash from speculators caused spectacular growth in the industry and in the construction of docks, factories, and ancillary facilities. Most capital was involved in projects offering no immediate or early returns.

Sounds like the AI bubble.

re: end goals: in most cases, you still need an end goal in mind in order to craft a process that will get you there. In the end, it is the process that matters and the goal is there only for measuring progress and adjusting course. However, a single process for a single goal is not enough in a dynamic changing world. You need a way of being able to react and adjust or even drastically change the process.

re: habits. Again, fully agree given a static goal. But if the circumstances change, the existing habits might no longer serve you. You need to be able to adjust habits.

re: hyper-rational. This is my style. I find that I can think, explain, and execute mechanically more effectively. It's practical. Deep down, there is a philosophy behind this, but I have a hard time explaining and applying philosophy.

When we think about goals we usually imagine a static end state. 75 kg body weight. 1,000,000 USD in my bank account. A happy life.

We try to define the goals using units and aim for them. This is fine in most cases.

It’s a way of thinking that is based around a static goal. But life is dynamic.

More recently I started thinking of having dynamic goals. Instead of a body weight goal, I will focus on a goal of building mechanisms that allow me to change my weight. If I lose a leg in the future and can’t run and my weight is 74 kg I did not hit my goal. If I develop different ways of limiting caloric input and different exercise routines that allow me to burn calories in different circumstances, I will be better prepared for whatever the future may bring.

I think it can be summed up as this: My goals will be based on building agile methods for adjusting course in a desirable direction, as needed.

Not sure if this is clear or how to call it. 2nd order goals? Dynamic goals?

> What if they have much worse paragraphs in the middle?

Do you think a book that has a particularly bad first few pages is more or less likely to have a lot of poor content in the middle vs. a book that has a really good first few pages?

Think about judging a 3 course meal. If the appetizer is bad, what is the chance that you will rate this meal as the best even if the main course and dessert were very good? If you are eating at restaurants that are supposedly great, the chance is tiny.

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Bonus question - how do you alert your team that your home-build PageDuty went down?

Managing people is hard because of all the things that make us human. Managing AI will be simpler as we won't need to deal with some of those things.

Separately,

> "By using AI we get all the benefits of workers but with none of the drawbacks of humans."

To be fair, I did not write that. You are projecting your thoughts on my post.

It was a whirlwind of a ride as the company caught up on 10 years of engineering maturity and 3 years of AI usage progress in 9 months. The improvement in output has been noticeable, and the quality has not dropped. In short, cycle time and throughput rose and quality remained stable.

One of the things we are talking about is the future. As the team learns how to use AI well, the amount of code will grow at a faster pace. The focus is now on writing things we really need, and ensuring the quality does not degrade.

We are trying to get the engineering team to lean into understanding the product and business domain, and also adopting a QA mindset.

One of the engineers is not interested in the business domain. He loves typing code. I am afraid that within six months it will not make sense to have him around. He is relatively junior and wants well-specced tickets, and is reluctant to use AI. Right now, Opus writes better code than him, and solves business problems more acutely, with less time spent on writing careful specs.

If he gets fired, the budget will likely be re-allocated to AI.

In 7 months, it will be fair to say that we replace 20% of the team with AI. If that happens, it will have been a thoughtful process focused on upskilling willing employees, and not a boneheaded hype-driven decision. But it will be judged on the summary and not the process that went into it.

Let's say I have daily backups, and get 10x done each day by being reckless and risking an "rm -rf", and let's say there's a 1% chance of an "rm -rf". I break even after 2 days of being reckless even if I get unlucky and on day 2 it wipes my drive. I spend day 3 and 4 recovering, and am still 6 days ahead based on the 10x work I got done on day 1.

What if I have a 50 day streak of not hitting an "rm -rf"? Early retirement?

I guess the work on day 1 should be to build a proper sandbox and drop the chance of an "rm -rf or worse" even down to 0.001%.

Tally it up and send a donation request to the agent operator.