PM in this sort of company—where there's no grand unifying vision vs just responding to customer requests—is the sort of almost-entirely-paperwork role that starts looking less necessary when you can have LLMs summarize all those comms and "analysis."

It was a topic in less-mainstream sci-fi well before that. And some more mainstream stuff like Star Trek TOS.

Frankly it seems more common than not in the last 40 years. I don't really remember a big wave of claims "Terminator is silly, no sort of AI could ever be malevolent!"

- everyone is damned and depraved

- god chose some people to save, at his own whim, for no reasons related to their actions

- jesus' death was a sacrifice to atone for those people, not for everyone

- the chosen can't opt-out (I'm merging two into one here)

I don't really see the connection to effective altruism at all. The way I grew up understanding it is actually more the opposite?

But that's also let me use "agent" stuff longer, I guess? The better you were at knowing what you wanted and how to ask for it, the less of an inflection point that you got from Opus 4.5 or GPT 5.

Some of the highest-time-saved-for-max-ROI agentic problems I've solved to date were in September and October of last year with Claude or Cursor.

I think that's the historical analogue. How is IBM doing compared to pre-personal-computer disruption? Initially-limited home OSes like DOS were good enough to eventually dominate business too. The AI labs, with their massive funding and spending, are speedrunning the whole thing in a way that just might make that disruption faster and more fatal vs the lingering zombie relying on the IBM name. (The more massive amounts of capital you raise on future speculation of enormouse TAMs before, say, becoming profitable, the more dependent you are on the future speculations of outside interests. Double-edged sword.)

And I don't think being suspicious of the future of OpenAI margins is the same as saying open source DIY will dominate at all.

People don't wanna install their own OS or deal with changes in their office suite or rack their own servers, but a low-cost AI provider is gonna be more like a Wikipedia-vs-Encarta situation in terms of accessibility and similarity-of-interface.

There's a crapload of new repos and Github and similar things. And a lot of it is "hobby utility" stuff like you'd find everywhere pre-mobile/pre-app-store but kinda dried up a bit with the browserfication+phone-ificiation of everything. Everything had to turn into an app + an online service.

Now, like OSS, freeware, and even most shareware in the 90s, most of these new projects have no path to VC-level interest.

The whole "basic business or business-process BUT ON THE INTERNET with a dash of social/web-2.0/personalization/crypto/fad-of-the-year" that recent VC firms have been pushing for the last 15+ years may be numbered.

But it's also unlikely that growing companies with big ambitions will want to base their business on vibe-coded free software for too long. It opens up too many unknowns/risks ("oh no, the disgruntled employee leveraged a misconfiguration in our in-house accounts payable system!") There will be a new middle ground model to be found.

"What can we get rid of for MVP" as a design strategy vs a way to iterate fast, for instance. Cutting things isn't a way to product cohesion, especially if you never go back to do the full-featured version.

Sometimes I wonder how many features or products flopped because the MVP dropped the things that would've actually taken off, and the business "smartly" pivoted away.

There's still a limit to how many new features you could shove in front of your users per month. But what if they were all much more baked out of the gate?

(See also: "data driven" product management as an excuse to not have your own vision for the product. If three competitors build a lot more in the span of six months, but have to depend more on their own skills and instincts vs A/Bing every little detail, maybe more of them will ship more bold and interesting new things.)

Even if they do, it still means they failed to save up that money without having to live with their parents.

This is just the WSJ-reading "haves" justifying the increasing stratification of society by reframing a clear regression[0] as a "responsible individual choice" which that crowd LOVES.

(EDIT: it's also cope for the parents of those kids for the not-quite-THAT-elite WSJ reader crowd who doesn't want to believe either their kids are failing or their economy is faltering.)

[0] Even if you see the everyone-moves-out vs multigenerational-housing trend as a negative overall, the broadening loss of the ability to make that choice is a clear symptom of overall economic weakening.

Many of the high-trust smaller societies before those locks were actually pretty low privacy.

How useful is it to know how to spend 5 times as much time and money to make your own piece of equipment that is now a commodity and readily-available?

For instance: 3d printers and automated metal and woodworking tools. Yeah, they exist. Yeah, it's never been more accessible to make your own tools and gadgets and toys with them. But no, they aren't tools that let you have even a 1-in-ten-thousand chance of being the next Tesla or Edison.

I've re-soldered shit in Xbox controllers, I've fixed stuck mechanisms in motorized Christmas decorations, I've saved thousands on labor for car repairs, I've built my own furniture, I've re-wired speakers and installed conduit at home.

But knowing how to do those things in the 2000s is not the same as inventing how to do those things or even knowing how to do those things as a well-compensated career before things were so completely consumerized and commoditized.

I'm still limited by the state of the world I'm playing in. It's worth learning those things if they strike your fancy, if you want to be able to do it for the love of the game, if you value knowledge generally (and I think you should!). But. It's also a something of a luxury hobby at this point.

I can't fab a new high-performance CPU. I can't even realistically learn enough to even compete design-wise with the teams upon teams of people already standing on the shoulders of giants in that industry, or in any other highly-technical highly-advanced one.

Like which one more frequently monitors your time in the bathroom?

It's trivially easy to see cases where freedom+justice+innovation can conflict with each other (it's even trivially easy to see where they can conflict with each other specifically for innovations involving the reduction of privacy, ye olde panopticon.)

So it's also trivially simple to understand that at some point you're gonna have to pick one over another. And note that freedom is the first word in that list.

Or "we're gonna cut off our older models to force people towards new cars instead of older ones." That's a bad pattern to let people selling $30,000+ devices get access to.

>(Except some things, of course, where people want to interact with a human).

And, of course, the things that the person holding the vision thinks they personally will still be doing. ;)

What examples are you thinking of?

Mainly what I remember is multiple waves of previous apocalypses not materializing. Off the top of my head:

- programming will contract because of higher level languages, you won't need nearly as many people

- outsourcing will kill programming job wages because one person can write the spec and ship it off to a team that will send back the working code for 1/10th the wage

- better modeling methods will kill programming job wages because one person can write the spec and the machine will generate the code based no it

Obviously that doesn't guarantee that this time will be the same. But you seem to be making a much stronger claim about what history tells us in the opposite direction...

Which count of countries comes out higher?

(7) is basically "a mechanic/service technician" which is literally a job that already exists all over the place. Is is, at least, the only one that doesn't seem like one of these "agents" could do itself today, but in the world where the agents get that good, that level of robotic ability - the ability to manipulate a screwdriver with human dexterity - doesn't seem very far off at all and is being actively invested in by many many people.

There's a lot more outside of software development.

It's mystifying to me why software - where bugs or weird behaviors are often obvious to users - is considered easier to replace with these tools than, say, product management (is this accurate research about what features would drive what revenue? who knows even today! is this summary of customer feedback accurate? nobody's gonna know if it's not!), marketing, middle management, or any number of line-of-business "inspect stuff and pass it along to the next person on the chain" roles.

So much of those roles are basically "how can we turn people into process-following machines for consistency and predictability" and intentionally de-valuing intentional reasoning. Adding natural language processing of the inputs/outputs + deterministic rule systems on what to do is basically the entirety of replacing them.

>“what do we do when we’ve successfully vanquished work itself?”

How does automating white-collar paper-pushing get us over the hump here? I think that would require a combination of human-level reasoning + extremely good robotics and automation, at the self-servicing level.

Which could be coming.

But until it happens, I think the real question around the "future of work" are more around what the future of exchange is. It doesn't necessarily have to look like 40 hour work weeks, which is a pattern that arose from pushback against industrialists trying to get ever-more hours out of people to watch the automation machinery and run the factories etc.

I think the interesting, non-apocalypse options fall into two categories:

1) what if you don't need white-collar knowledge factories anymore but smaller groups of individuals can establish markets between themselves with much-more-personalized services and solutions. Can you reverse the traditional economies of scale? Running SaaS as a megacorp requires a certain amount of hard-to-iterate-in-a-try-until-the-tests-pass decisions and expertise since you're trying to be everything to everyone 24x7. If you can provide a more customized version of the same service to a smaller group of people with much less operational overhead for even just 1/10000'th of a giant SaaS vendor's current revenue, you might have something (1/10000 of Salesforce's 40B revenue, for instance, is quite non-trivial).

2) what will people want when everything they spend heavily on today is commoditized? This is the historical path, and why we've never vanquished work in the past. Either ways to get an edge over a competitor by doing more for less, instead of the same for less; or improvements in essential goods and services (you don't need million dollar cancer treatments before they exist, but once they do you don't want to opt out); or in new novelties, keeping up with the Joneses. Showing off. Etc.

This is different in two ways from the classic TDD red-green-refactor suggestion:

1) they don't start with the test first, so the tests that get implemented are after writing the code, and run the risk of the model attention being now more influenced by the just-written code than the original spec

2) they finish when everything is green and don't followup with the "refactor" step unless manually prompted (either directly or indirectly by your own scaffolding/rules/whatever). this results in frequent hyper-local non-ideal-longterm fixes for things that went wrong in the first shot at writing the code pre-test-writing.

(As always, the only person who can ensure the code landing in your repo is good is you.)