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.

The Microsoft emails are coming from microsoft-noreply@microsoft.com so it's a bit different than in this article.

It’s ok to stop providing updates to old software and hardware.

It’s OK to not support ancient devices when writing news software.

It’s not ok to make old devices inoperable if they are using the old software and don’t need updates.

Will my old Kindle stop being able to show me the books I bought and downloaded to it? Or will it become impossible to buy new books? If it’s the earlier, it’s borderline criminal. If it’s the latter, I’m unhappy but understand realities.

If you accumulated a fortune, there was some skill at play. There was also considerable luck and some exploitation. The wealth tax is a way of paying back for the luck and exploitation.

You will still be extremely wealthy.

Paul wants to play the fairness card. Life is not fair and those who accumulated massive fortunes won the lottery. Don’t let the massively rich conflate issues. Don’t get fooled.

The math seems off. How is 7.8 million vs 4 million 95% more expensive. Article makes good points but I doubt the numbers as they don’t add up.

Still agree with the conclusion though.

I've worked with people who demonstrated below-average judgement, and I've seen cases of good judgement from AI. I think if a company can identify the poor performers and part wit them, there is a decent chance that the remaining people with AI in hand can more than make up the difference.