ruddsky

Ha ha. I suppose an inverted j curve technology would offer short term productivity but yield long term slow-downs. I can see aspects of that - perhaps using agents people write code that quickly adds the next feature but overall is not maintainable. Or they quickly write a project plan but in the long term it doesn’t result in good payoffs. I’ve already observed both of these.

I think the hardest part to figure out will be delineating the illusion of productivity from actual productivity.

In the other hand - we do have empirical research (from the economist in this article) even from 2023 showing LLMs ability to offer real productivity in certain tasks : https://www.nber.org/papers/w31161. And the models have become much more better since then.

So it’s probably a question of if we can use them for what they are good for without being lulled by the sirens song of fake productivity.

If it’s helpful to anyone, I just wrote a short blog post on this exact topic. It goes into the “j-curve” which was the proposed solution to the productivity paradox, and discusses some of the empirical research around it.

https://lightsight.ai/blog/j-curve

My hope is that you make a similar book on databases. :)

Crafting Interpreters is one of my favorite technical books ever and serves as a masterclass is technical communication. Thank you!!!

I made something similar recently: https://qlab.netlify.app

It’s a quiz app where you can select any topic.