zero_shift
AI is not free. Even "free" and open source models require complex silicon to operate. The silicon and copper is assembled in complex fabrication plants. Those plants are very close to geopolitical belligerents
What I resist is the dependence. I'm not willing to trade short term productivity, for long term dependence
I've seen the situation where underqualified, overambitious programmers build an internal platform that becomes a monster. There isn't the time to mature it, there isn't a standard or docs to point to, it becomes a drain on the company, at worst someone's vanity project.
I've also seen the situation where a team absolutely refuses to build anything themselves out of anxiety, spending enormous amounts of money on an external solution that acts as a rent extractor.
The problem with buy-not-build, is if you do it for too long, you forget how to do the latter. This is great right up until you find a problem you can't buy your way out of.
Sometimes building something half good, is fast enough and educational enough to get you to the next step.
They wouldn't be able to draw it all onto a whiteboard from memory. But give them a half day and they will have mapped out the data flow
In those cases, the economy and society you want to externalises losses onto has every right to negotiate something in return. We are not in the business of just forgiving multi billion debts.
To put it as politely as possible, he seems like the kind of person who comes to a conclusion after writing his essays, not before.
There's not enough moat and the open models just have to be good enough for people to cheap out.
It sounds remarkable, and I didn't believe it at first. But after more reading, I am convinced an influential part of Anthropic leadership really is something like a religious movement
(I don't have a theology degree, but I do have an English degree. I have read parts of KJV, and it has literary significance, but it is not attempting to be a bare literal translation)
Sin: A Slop Colon!
There is a question what the causality was there. Did we start trusting AI because it became excellent? Or just because we stopped checking it?
People ask AI to do things either they haven't done, cannot do, or don't want to.
So when the AI produces something that basically works and looks like a plausibly good attempt, they jump to the conclusion that AI must be excellent at that task.
The code change itself doesn't specifically matter. But suffice to say, it was about an AI feature in one of our products.
The code was stamped by Claude driven by a prompt. The prompt was for a ticket generated with the Atlassian AI integration. Atlassian had digested docs made with AI. The docs came from strategy memos I'm 90% sure were written entirely by Claude.
The strategy was chosen by management at the urging of exec leadership. The execs now communicate mostly via AI written memos. I do not know how they make decisions, but they reference tech influencers, market conditions, customer expectations.
This gave me pause. Who had actually made the decision then? Arguably there has been several layers of human review, but the actual source of the decision was hard to pin down.
We were not building the feature because we wanted it. We were building it because we thought other people expected it.
Perhaps reflecting on the state of the market, I thought, could indicate who was actually in control.
Where do investor and customer expectations come from in 2026? It is very murky, at least in tech. There appears to be hype. Some hype comes from true believers, some comes from cynics. But both respond to market incentives that reward bigger and bigger claims.
Where does the market's "action" come from? What is the driver?
Investors do not really seem to understand what the tech is or its limitations. Some are passive operators. Others are just responding to the overall froth and speculation in the market - which becomes a runaway feedback cycle.
This left me lost.
Nobody in this ecosystem, I thought, is actually in control here.
Nobody is actually orienting work and action to real, concrete goals. It's all based on speculation and anxiety about the future.
So it is not only that nobody understands what the code does. It is that we cannot, or at least I cannot, explain the motivation. There doesn't seem to "be" any form of "intention" in this environment.
It has all been hollowed out, replaced either be inscrutable machines, or inscrutable incentives.
Ironically it rather resembles the kind of "misaligned" superintelligence we are supposed to be avoiding.
You can have billions in nominal units but it is inflated to worthlessness when resources or labour disappear
It's that they're a very insular, incestuous sub-culture whose origins come from early 2000s science fiction message boards and which has been distilled through the cod utilitarianism of the Effective Altruism people.
That doesn't mean the ideas are "bad" because "bad" is some infectious transitive property. But it does mean they are intellectually homogeneous; disdain experts in other fields; treat ethics as mathematical functions with infinite-sized terms; and whose opinions about AI pre-date the development of LLMs themselves.
They also - I will be direct here - have a history of handwaving bad behaviour, conflicts of interest, and recklessness.
When cliques take over something - businesses, technologies, politics - it means intellectual diversity leaves the room and important decisions get made, not due to practical reasons, but increasingly arcane wranglings within the clique itself
It has definitely accelerated my learning: through the process of writing rigorous plans, I have learned so much about network programming... the intricacies of HTTP2, how to design a fast MITM proxy, performance pitfalls in SSL...
These are things I studiously avoided learning for a decade, now demystified, mostly through Claude patiently rendering many figures and diagrams.
And with Fable, I was able to ship a working Envoy Rust extension in a one-shot.
On the other hand, my grasp on the details is tenuous. Every so often the agent can't progress and I am stuck for ideas, hitting different prompts like they were slot machines. I forget how to solve problems by myself.
I can feel myself becoming supine and dependent on something I know is going to become more expensive, a dependency AI vendors will seek to exploit. It has happened quickly. I do not really consent; it is forced on me by my employer.
I used to have several good answers, but now I use Claude for everything, I can't remember any