bwhiting2356

a young couple doesn't need 2x the space as a single person though

It's not just fewer people getting married, fewer people are even living with a partner. Living together has economies of scale.

I feel like I'm missing something. They seem to not even have basic observability and online evals. It's not that hard to look at a trace and answer the question "is it writing code for that makes an external network request?" with reasonable accuracy.

science is still early here

Whoever is giving a bad coder resources and access will eventually stop

> three AirBnBs, two Stripes, and three Dropboxes

you want more SaaS?

how does this non dev manager have perms to do this

when I tell codex to build me a chat app and it uses gpt-4o

my bad

> but, given that all of their peers have adopted it, there is a serious social cost to opting out.

The same was true of smoking. A combination of gov regulation and social stigma have managed to reduce smoking rates.

Yes (and many more options). The alternative is having all the construction workers, teachers, janitors continue to labor and pay taxes while the former knowledge workers sit on the sidelines, which would be deeply unfair.

in your link, the "true rate" has also not risen since the rise of AI, was higher in 1995

U.S. unemployment rate is steady at ~4% and we are now almost 4 years after the release of ChatGPT. The Jobs Apocalypse seems to be always on the horizon. UBI is being pushed by college educated workers burnt out of white collar work (understandably), but when you suggest to them working construction, teaching school, or working in a hospital, they deflect and go quiet.

Why not let them have the status boost? This isn't zero sum.

Many CEOs are bad and their businesses will either fail or be bailed out. But the work CEOs do is probably some of the last to get automated - higher order strategy, relationship building, managing people.

Can you show me an example where prices went down (in the long term)?

Increasing housing supply does not decrease home values, because high density housing benefits from network effects/economies of agglomeration. NIMBYs don't object because they think their house will be worth less, they object because they believe their quality of life will go down (based on what is important to them).

Higher density brings both good and bad:

upside: - high paying, specialized jobs - specialized, high quality services - stores open late - better dating (more fish in the sea)

downside: - more traffic - more noise - more pollution - more anonymity, crime (people in small towns leave their doors unlocked and say hi on the sidewalk)

The people who benefit most from higher density tend to be young professionals, which tend to not currently live in the neighborhood and will move in if density goes up.

big disagree. Making assumptions about UX from code only without looking was a major problem. (Although vision is still not great. Trying to be patient)

We need benchmarks to measure unnecessary bloat. I'm happy it solved the puzzle, did it also ship 500+ lines of no-op?

before the industrial revolution, worker revolts were sometimes attempted but almost universally immediately squashed, as workers had even less power

what alternative are people proposing?

waymos don't remove lanes of traffic, they remove parked cars and parking infrastructure, which is still pretty huge. In many suburbs, parking is the real bottleneck not traffic.

A fully automated utopia isn't just going to happen. Even with frontier models, the integrations, the evals, the UX, need a lot of work and someone needs to do it. After I've automated this thing I'll move on to the next task, this is what it means to be a software engineer.

> A June 2025 study of Microsoft developers

A year ago feels like forever

I suspect there's a ceiling on failure rates people are willing to operate under. A diversified investor might still be willing to take high risk/reward bets. But workers can go their whole career producing nothing of value. It becomes hard to tell the difference between smart, hard working people who were unlucky and lazy grifters. I've done 2 series-A startups and I don't think I can do another one.

very cool. some feedback: tricky to mouse over the tooltip to click links within the tooltip

nice to see humans writing

Conversations that go on forever (and spend money forever) makes for a very unhappy customer

Could be lack of imagination on my part but I truly can't imaging shipping 1000's of lines of code that I can't understand (beyond low-stakes prototypes). That means there's a ceiling on productivity gains.