Can we build a list of the actual nerds who care? Need it for my future recruitment needs lol.

The benchmark is "do they do it for fun", i.e. personal projects.

But the real trick isn't "number of personal projects", but how weird they are. There's no "rational" reason to do them, they don't increase the person's marketability / hireability. They are done purely for intrinsic reasons.

(On reflection, this also seems to be a pretty robust predictor of autism. :)

I think its a direct reflection of the fact that most people really prefer to go-go-go and not spend the time up-front thinking about what their project even is, why it matters and is it worth dedicated resources toward it. The abandonment usually reflects the answer - no it was not worth it.

LLMs amplify this behaviour.

You quote me then start speaking about things completely unrelated to anything I said.

We can't choose if the LLM is like us unless you want to go back 10-20 years in time and choose a new direction for AI/ML.

We stumbled upon an architecture with mostly superficial similarities to how we think and learn, and instead focused on being able to throw more compute and more data at our models.

You're talking about ergonomics that exist at a completely different layer: even if you want to make LLM based products for humans, around humans, you have to accept it's not a human and it won't make mistakes like a human (even if the mistakes look human) -

If anything you're going to make something that burns most people if you just blindly pretend it's human-like: a great example being products that give users a false impression of LLM memory to hide the nitty gritty details.

In the early days ChatGPT would silently truncate the context window at some point and bullshit its way through recalling earlier parts of the conversation.

With compaction it does better, but still degrades noticeably.

If they'd exposed the concept of a context window to the user through top level primitives (like being able to manage what's important for example), maybe it'd have been a bit less clean of a product interface... but way more laypeople today would have a much better understanding of an LLM's very un-human equivalent to memory.

Instead we still give users lossy incomplete pictures of this all with the backends silently deciding when to compact and what information to discard. Most people using the tools don't know this because they're not being given an active role in the process.

The more difficult it is to trace one’s labour to output.. expect more theatrics ;)

Exactly what I expected to read after reading the first part of your post lol.

I’m starting to realise, many people and the management themselves don’t really understand why the firm exists, and what they do. Funny to watch tbh

I agree generally but there are periods where creative people show up and a whole slew of existing firms go bust/shrink due to one’s ability to envision a path toward creative destruction.

The problem of life in general is the last 5-10% is always the hardest. And it makes no economic sense in many cases to invest in trying to make that last part mechanised.

I believe the llm providers went with the wrong approach from the off - the focus should’ve been on complementing labour not displacement. And I believe they have learned an expensive lesson along the way.

Correct me if I’m wrong Simon, but weren’t you highly optimistic about llm’s and agentic-use of them?

I believe this is a common fault of not being able to zoom out and look at what trade offs are being made. There’s always trade-offs, the question is whether you can define them and then do the analysis to determine whether the result leaves you in a net benefit state.

I still am. I think setting up LLMs to call tools in a loop is a fascinating way to build interesting software that could not have existed before.

Coding agents are also upending how software development works, in a way that we are still very much figuring out.

I don't think anyone has a confident answer for how best to apply them yet, especially on larger production-ready projects.

I think you kind of answered this in the post though. "I want somebody to have used the thing" is dogfooding. and it's probably the only quality signal left that can't be generated in 30 minutes.

Hype