My current working theory for the seemingly irreconcilable differences between programmers' experiences with LLMs is grounded in their ability and willingness to explain what they want in sufficient detail. AI is not a mind-reader.

Think about how far we've come over the past three years. Programming with AI in ten years will be utterly unfathomable. It would be like showing Fable 5 to someone a decade ago. It will be unbelievable.

In twenty years, programming by hand might be somewhat akin to writing assembly today: a skill that a limited number of programmers understand, and fewer still actively practise. Writing code by hand will become the new "I want to be close to the metal."

Perhaps by 2050, the concept of a Linux "distro" will be obsolete, replaced by a GPL-licensed local AI that just directly assembles everything from scratch to meet your exact specifications. Instead of relying on a predefined package manager, it traverses a distributed network of trust to find suitable candidate parts, downloading and verifying every line of source code before compiling it all locally. Trust would be rooted in the local AI's ability to understand and evaluate it, meaning that what replaces the distro are the groups competing for the best models.

Perhaps by 2070, nobody even writes or distributes code any more. The future kernel and web browser aren't code, they're descriptions of verifiable intent. A software project is really an extremely detailed description of what the software is meant to do. Your local GPL-licensed AI would decide how to write, assemble, patch, optimise, and integrate it for your hardware and your threat model. That would also blur the distinction between kernels, operating systems, and applications. The AI doesn't construct a computing environment as we know it today with discrete applications. It builds a coherent system that satisfies all requirements, rebuilding parts whenever your priorities change.

Downloading compiled code? Implicitly trusting someone else's source code? These will become the things people only do on hardware that is sufficiently air-gapped from any outside influence.

And the reporting was still gated through Apple employees; there was no mechanism for the government to expand the scope without Apple’s knowledge.

I understand that people don’t like the idea of their personal hardware being complicit in treachery, but when considered from a purely functional perspective, apple’s proposal was no different to what Google and others were already doing.

Sorry, but I'm calling bullshit. I know there's no absolute smoking gun here, but it's all a bit too cute to be unintentional. They are very very smart people. They knew what they were doing.

If you wanted to be REALLY clever, you could get it to start playing the slow mo the moment the ball is detected.

Or perhaps replays could be gated behind a button push. Ball detection copies the current video buffer into an secondary buffer; the button plays whatever is in the secondary buffer.

Or you could make it a web app, and stream replays to people's phones when they're on the alley's wi-fi. That has the benefit of making an epic moment saveable and shareable.

* Mount a 60 fps camera pointed at the pins.

* Continuously record a short looping buffer in memory (5 seconds would be more than enough).

* When the ball-trigger fires, wait an extra second, then freeze the buffer and play the buffer once at normal speed, then again at 1/4 speed.

* Finally, restart the recording loop.

If it's a dark alley, you could use a low-light camera such as an Arducam with the STARVIS IMX462 (no IR-cut) and if ambient light is still too low, add a few infrared floodlights. Having instant slow-mo every time the ball hits would be a crowd pleaser, especially with kids and casual venues. If one of my nearby alleys had this, I wouldn't go to any other alley.

Learning any language involves internalising a massive pile of arbitrary syntax / core library knowledge. I find it flow-destroying and demotivating to be continually hampered by having to look up silly little things like how to get the length of a string, or how to work with dates. Being able to use AI to instantly turn a line of pseudo-code into a line of real code is not just great for productivity, it teaches me the language faster than any way I've experienced before.

My pre-AI coding style has always been to write terse pseudo-code first, just so I can map out core logic, what I'm iterating over, and what the meat of the routine will do. I formatted this pseudo-code as comments, and then treat them like headers, where I write the real code underneath. AI tab completion has made this way of coding insanely more productive, and gives me an incentive to write better pseudo.

(I also don't mind getting AI to write a whole page at a time, especially when it's a slab of uncreative boilerplate or glue code. AI routinely does a perfect job of smashing that out. But I will always pick through it line by line, renaming and rewriting in my personal style.)

I strictly avoid allowing AI to change the level of abstraction I program in. Defining and orchestrating the architecture of an application is the most fun part anyway — quite apart from being the most important when others are touching your code, whether meat bags or LLMs.

25 years in my case, by the way, and I have found this to be the most liberating and creativity-boosting period of my career. And it’s not even close. I’ve written code in more languages in the past few years than in any other period. I’m finishing more projects than ever before. I’m learning faster than ever before. I’m enjoying programming more than ever before.

And to be clear, I don’t use AI for anything other than as a pair programming partner, or to build single-use scripts. I agree that full-blindfold vibe coding is unpleasant, it’s like getting into a debate with a forgetful and emotionless monkey paw. Skip the vibe coding, just let AI be a helper.

Claiming that life expectancy "fell for several generations" is a poor reading of the data. Most generously there was a period of stagnation predominantly caused by a combination of scarlet fever and rapid urbanisation.

More generally you're arguing against positions I haven't espoused and which I don't think even represent areas of disagreement. Productivity gains and social organisation are not opposing forces. The surplus from higher output made shorter hours, better pay, public health, and medicine sustainable, making it possible for labour movements to secure larger shares and better terms of that surplus. We live in an amazing world now, if you take a moment to stop and think about what actually matters.

As for the rest, it's a remarkably selective account of the industrial revolution. Your argument relies upon the unspoken inference that pre-industrial agricultural life was somehow a better life that was diminished by progress.

The tractor did not merely replace farm workers. It allowed a tiny fraction of the population to produce vastly more food while releasing millions of people from exhausting agricultural labour. Perhaps you would prefer a life of hard physical labour, low output, poor medicine, food insecurity, and little protection against injury, disease, or harvest failure. Perhaps you don't like that you toil away in an air-conditioned office writing video game code, for a salary that you wish was higher, because you dread the cost of your next smartphone purchase.

Technological change created enormous productivity gains. Yes, these often unfairly disadvantage workers trained in the outgoing industries. But I don't hear you arguing for a return to hand-weaving, because the societal benefit of progress is inarguable.

The RAM example is particularly absurd. Two decades ago, ordinary consumers were not complaining about the price of 64 or 128 GB of RAM because owning that much was barely imaginable. You are complaining about access to a product that exists only because capitalism drove extraordinary technological progress. Obsessing over RAM shows a lack of historical perspective and a badly distorted idea of what constitutes a good life.

Yes, concentrated wealth means Warren Buffett has a disproportionately large share of influence. But that does not mean Warren Buffett also consumes a disproportionately large share of the resources that represent human flourishing. Ownership, political power, and physical consumption are different things. Corporate shares are not sandwiches ripped from the mouths of children.

And blaming every disliked event, from wars to Epstein to electronics prices, on conspiracies involving the ultra-wealthy is exactly the kind of unhinged, zero-sum populism that corrodes democracy. Instead of evidence and analysis, we're given a third rate morality play about a wicked elite stealing everything from "the people". Extreme polarisation and populist thinking are corrosive forces in modern society.

Production and consumption are directly linked: societies can consume only what they produce. When individuals become more productive, society has more to consume. And indeed there is more. So much more. What you call a "fairy tale" is, thankfully, the world we live in.

When considering prosperity, it's important to emphasise what's real. So what if Warren Buffett owns a massive number of shares in notionally highly valued corporations? There are plenty of carrots available in the supermarket, and at an extraordinarily low prices by historical standards. Warren Buffett is not personally consuming some grotesquely disproportionate share of the carrots ... or pretty much any commodity which constitutes real material prosperity.