Why are we surprised? Even if you're a good programmer, if you finish a job and you ask your also very good peer to review it, you're gonna end up with better code. Of course you're gonna end up with better code. So build that into your process.
Don't try to anticipate anything. You will literally go crazy. Because even the smartest brains in the business cannot anticipate what two model hops from here is going to look like. It's an absolute waste of time, and you will develop an AI psychosis trying to deduce what two years from now is gonna look like. Focus on right now, and right now is the most incredible time to be into computers.
I think you're gonna have a hard time coping with the new reality if the only thing you loved about programming was the mechanical bits of putting the right logical constructs together to produce something other people told you to produce. Because that mechanical process is under threat. If you are, as you just mentioned, excited about building things, I don't think you're under threat at all.
Countries and peoples have a right to set an immigration policy, and this notion that we shouldn't have any borders or, or even worse than that, it's all just a blank slate, that all peoples are just the same, and we can take people from one place of the earth and we can place them in another place on the earth and everything's just gonna work out hunky-dory. Empirically not true.
I actually I do wanna die. I don't wanna do this forever. Like, I think the human li- lifespan of about 90 to 100 sounds about right. I'm embracing the finitude of life.
A few months ago I read an essay about silence by Amir Zadnemat in 3 Quarks Daily, called "The Symphony of Silence: An Exploration of the Sound of Absence"*. The most interesting section was a riff on various kinds of silence, especially in spoken language, each communicating something very distinct despite the fact that objectively each silence sounds (or I guess doesn't sound) identical:
Maybe I would pick something again that's that's in the category hard and boring because that's usually a category that is a little bit easier to actually find people that will appreciate when you solved something. If you pick something that is fun, even if it's hard, you're gonna have a very tough time, especially in a time where people can just prompt things into existence.
Yeah, I mean I think it's really having incredibly good taste in what you ask your agents to work on, right? That is the the crux of you know from my background uh a research problem. You know, a researcher can have all the tools and all the techniques, but often most of the battle is what problem are you gonna spend your time on?
But now with Claude Code on my VPS in the last year, it just live edits on my production server, which sounds like it should go wrong but it just doesn't, it's very careful and only twice in 12 months messed up which meant my site didn't load for 10 seconds which is OK
The phrase "your feelings are valid" does not invite curiosity or deeper self-understanding, which is the point of psychotherapy. It is the mirror image of "stop whining and get a grip." One sounds warm and one sounds harsh, but neither deepens self-awareness.
You probably only have one good idea in your whole product. Get the user to experience that as fast as possible. Well, it sounds so easy, but if you go try every single product out there, you will see a million accidental steps they introduced from the user hearing about your product to like seeing the value in it.
this is the rule is really simple. only make deposits. Never make withdrawals. That's it. Because you're going to make withdrawals by accident sometimes because you're gonna make mistakes, but you never intentionally make a withdrawal.
Where I get fired up, and this ties back to the AI discussion, is when that's turned into this meme, that programmers no longer have to be competent. I mean the AI is gonna figure it out. The generators is gonna figure it out. I don't need to know SQL, active record is gonna abstract it away from me. No, no, no dude, hold up. The path here is competence.
Their words now
really good programmers are currently more valuable than ever because they're the ones who are able to get the most out of the AI acceleration.
If I say it reads a bit like fanfic for Neumeier's own work, that sounds like I'm damning it, but I actually enjoyed it, because, I wanted good things to happen for those characters, who'd had drama enough and to spare.
And so this loop, this cycle, is gonna go on and on and on. It kinda comes down to basically intelligence is gonna scale by one thing, and that's compute.
You know, a lot of people would say, "You know AI is gonna completely destroy software. We don't need software anymore. We don't even need tools anymore." That's ridiculous.
Which is, you know, you’re the game designer who’s playing God, and players are the ants in your ant farm, and you want to see what they’re gonna do, which is not the correct way to be a good multiplayer designer.
Small studios are the future of gaming. The big studios basically acquire the small studios for new IP and ideas, and the small studios grow in. The really compelling, new, innovative ideas are gonna come out of small studios.
That is the best prop artist in the industry. That’s who’s gonna show up on our doorstep, so when they show up here, we should treat them like the best prop artist in the industry instead of starting from a place of doubt and cynicism.
I kind of get the impression that, you know, some of the other companies have not written down the spreadsheet, that they don't really understand the risks they're taking. They're just kind of doing stuff cuz it sounds cool.
Consider using a noise machine to offset environmental sounds or earplugs if necessary. Temperature controlled mattresses such as Eight Sleep are great.
And once they had the idea that you could write sounds with pictures, that’s the crucial thing, that a picture of a foot not only meant foot but it meant the sound of the word for foot.
So if you’re very fond of somebody or you love somebody and they die, it’s kind of infantile to whine about it ever after. Because what did you think was gonna happen? Either you or them.
So think about this. If your brain is this most valuable tool you have in your journey to success and happiness, why would you destroy this tool for short-term pleasure? This sounds ridiculous.
it's a luxury good like you're not paying the penalty for that the people who embrace it and think that they can just ask AI for everything or they can just look everything up but they don't have to understand the copy pasta that they slam into their project they're the ones who going to suffer
Their words now
Where I get fired up, and this ties back to the AI discussion, is when that's turned into this meme, that programmers no longer have to be competent. I mean the AI is gonna figure it out. The generators is gonna figure it out. I don't need to know SQL, active record is gonna abstract it away from me. No, no, no dude, hold up. The path here is competence.
We know that a lot of the American companies are very invested in safety, and that is the central culture of a place like Anthropic. And I think Anthropic sounds like a wonderful place to work, but if safety is your number one goal, it takes way longer to get artifacts out.
Because why on earth there would be two candidates, one of whom has cognitive problems and the other of whom has judgment problems? These are the two biggest issues with the nuclear launch, judgment and cognition. And so where’s the young-ish, thoughtful, forward looking, wise, dedicated civil servant running for president? I know that sounds fantastical, but I wish it weren’t.
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