The funny thing is that with $40T of public dept US is basically taking money from other countries (in exchange for a pice of paper saying IOU) and then using that money to force these countries to do what’s in US best interests (real or perceived).
And the bigger that pile of debt is the more every government is invested in us not going bankrupt, hence the leverage just gets stronger.
US is basically a private equity typo of global power - getting others to lend them a knife it stabs them in the back.
Wouldn’t that necessarily mean that if the US keeps making enemies of allies, then the premium required for these countries to give US money would be higher? Sure, I’ll lend you some, but I don’t trust you that much, you’ll have to pay me more.
I am not defending the US government but the reason why you hold treasuries is because if you want to buy something in two years, or ten years, etc. there is a good chance you will want to buy something with dollars. Oil, soy beans, New York real estate..
Until you can buy oil without dollars. This was an explicit agreement called the Petrodollar system, which was premised on the US navy securing international trade. If the US navy proves unable to do that (and exhausts its arms and demonstrates unpreparedness for future conflicts) then the whole premise falls apart.
You might also stop buying real estate if the government seems unstable and economy is poised to collapse. Good soybeans also depend on fuel prices and the continued flow of fertilizer...
To nitpick, much of that is probably due to halting refining for export and drawing down reserves. But of course the point stands that they are rapidly electrifying and expanding renewable generation.
Oil will only become more and more volatile. The supply chain is both complex and fragile to geopolitical nonsense. China is betting on stability and reliability, environmental concerns is just a bonus.
China has large coal reserves, enough for many decades.
"China, the world’s largest coal consumer, has domestic reserves of coal to last the next 50 years, according to annual reserves data from the Ministry of Natural Resources cited by Bloomberg.
At current rates of domestic production, China also has crude oil reserves that could last for at least 18 more years, according to the ministry"
Wow. Only enough reserves to be measured in decades? Once it's gone it's gone. Genuine Carboniferous coal, one day a thousand years from now, might be a rare museum item!
I have a habit of thinking about history in very long terms, and that just does not sit right with me. That kind of thinking (oh we have enough for decades, let it rip!) happens, and the decades pass, and time inevitably is less kind to the descendants of such decision makers.
Also, this means that if we let MBAs destroy this civilization, there won’t be any future advanced civilizations as we will have consumed all the easily usable resources they will need to jumpstart their technology tree from zero again. Even if the knowledge survives it could be useless
growing up (in the 70s/80s), the first time I was shocked at the exponential destructiveness of human civilisation was when I learnt that we had polluted the oceans. the second was when I found out that ubiquitous natural resources like oil could be completely consumed. I feel like either one would have been unthinkable even as late as 1900.
(incidentally the latest such shock was sometime this decade when I learnt that an aquifer could not only be depleted, but that that depletion would compact the soil so that it would thereafter be unable to hold water, and thus never (at least on our timescales) be able to be replenished. I think I'm still not over that!)
There is an interesting passage in Moby Dick where they talk about whether whaling could make whales go extinct, but the concern is brushed away as human hubris. How could humans completely destroy something that God created?
From the point of view of energy. The conversion of solar energy into coal is very inefficient, tree need energy to reproduce, only a part of plant is converted into coal, other organisms consuming plant matter, etc.
Until you find a more thrustworthy stewart of the international order. Everyone yells loudly about how bad the us is, but then you realize that the whole world voted with there feet that every other alternative is worse. The russians tried for years to write some replacement fiction into reality (BRICS) even though they would be the first to get shanked if the old great game returned. Its a absurd situation where empire cosplayers long for the times of "greatness" while struggling on even small "to real" acts ..
China's government is "very stable" until it's not. As a society, China has a long history but the central government has essentially collapsed or experienced violent revolution in 1976, 1969, 1949, 1927, 1911, 1850, 1796, 1644, etc. Perhaps we have reached "the end of history" and the Chinese Communist Party will now maintain stable control forever. Or maybe it will all fall apart again in a few decades due to resource shortages or factional power struggles or a foreign war.
That seems to be a recurring theme regardless of the country's economic system. We're two months away from seeing if the US still has a working succession strategy.
> Everyone yells loudly about how bad the us is, but then you realize that the whole world voted with there feet that every other alternative is worse.
The main problem right now is that the US are not the US for which we voted with our feet. They are a worse alternative to the US that created the status quo (to their advantage obviously, but much of the world also benefitted from free trade and the lack of other world wars).
In a way, the bond market tracks international central banks' confidence that this will continue to be true. If they lose some of that confidence, their stock of bonds moves from USD to RMB/EUR/JPY/AUD/CAD/SGD/etc.
True, except you're being way too easy on those other currencies. Currencies need to be issued by groups able to guarantee international trade, otherwise there's no point.
RMB - maybe, but nobody sane trusts China to not immediately change priorities on a dime
EUR - imho (much) less chance than RMB, but they're using a hack: of EUR is a massive entity and internally there's no choice. Literally not allowed (due to tax reasons) (exceptions of course made for favored entities) (I feel that those favored entities exist, and how big they are, should be a huge red flag for anyone considering using EUR)
JPY - can't project force ... and doesn't even try
AUD - no
CAD - no
SGD - no
I don't understand why you're not listing GBP, as they have at least at some point done this. Of course they were a worse steward of international trade than the worst point of the US. Also, you consider AUD, but not CHF?
So what choice is there, really? This is really a way to try to push the US to do more, for less "exorbitant privilege" (especially EUR). Of course, a great many people are very interested in doing just that. It strikes me as an extremely dangerous game to play. Yes, the odds of winning are good, but if you lose, you lose everything.
I was going by foreign currency reserves, which feature CAD and AUD in much greater quantities than CHF. Also I swapped in SGD for GBP, whoops.
Global reserves continue to hold USD in greater quantities than anything else. A movement away from the USD still means a relative loss of faith in the US. If there's nobody who can guarantee trade then you still need to hold reserves, right? You just have to hold a broad and shallow pool rather than going deep on one currency.
Pretty confident it’s going to be EUR, note how they dealt with Trump tariff’s shenanigans. Took it slowly, and decidedly, sure let the countries say words and what not, but at the end of the day it’s decided by the EU. Just one persons opinion.
And you're not terrified that's the situation? The beef the US has with the EUR is simple: the US is what's defending Europe militarily (nuclear and non-nuclear. The Pentagon is the reason Ukraine hasn't been nuked yet, or more likely, that Kiyv didn't surrender because they didn't have nukes). That was never given freely. It was politically impossible to get governments to actually pay for that, so it was decided to trade in USD (this was before petrodollar), giving the US "exorbitant privilege" (which roughly translates to that the US gets to tax most of global trade at something like 2 to 4% and use that for themselves). That the US got that was not an accident, but a policy decision. The Euro takes that away, but of course, no European country is willing to either now start paying, or to defend itself. To say nothing of France, the Netherlands or Denmark defending remote EU territories like Greenland, ABC islands or Polynesia (which would require, for starters, militarily controlling supply lines to those territories).
Given the history of economic sanctions (what the EU is doing) ... of course people don't know that history, but the TLDR is that nearly always economic sanctions are a prelude to war. They don't just not work. In many cases they cause wars. WW1 was caused by economic sanctions (and the scale of EU economic sanctions is 100x bigger than what caused WW1), and often the economic sanctions on Germany after WW1 are generally thought to be the big reason for WW2. It makes sense from a game theory perspective: if a government, whose power is fundamentally based on force, lets economic sanctions convince them, they will be attacked by their own people. So they simply cannot give in, and historically that's what you indeed mostly see: when a country is targeted by economic sanctions, it's government usually decides to attack.
The EUR is imposing very large scale sanctions on ... essentially everyone. Russia and China most obviously of course, but sanctions are so widely used by the EU you can literally say it's being used against everyone from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, or geographically from Paraguay to North Korea. And why is the EU doing this? Exactly the reason Trump is doing it: sanctions are "power without needing parliament to approve the budget for anything".
The fear is: the historically most likely outcome of what the EU is doing, what EUR is being used for, is another very large scale war.
> Go further with your reasoning... Why would anyone lend the US more...
Because if you don't, you are abducted or killed or "regime changed" or sanctioned to famine-level poverty - all for "freedom & democracy". Kindly remember that the Corporate States of America has the world's most powerful military... well I suppose it is nowadays in the top #3.
The real answer to your question is the US bond market is an auction, and rates are going up and up, with some sketchy tactics being employed to try and keep them down.
What’s happening to US bonds has been compared to using a credit card to pay off your mortgage...
its mostly because the global economy is dollarized so there's a number of benefits store your wealth in dollars as a hedge or point of stability.
If the dollar's dominance wanes, so too will be the appetite for US treasuries.
US capital markets are the largest and most liquid in the world. It's not even close.
There are of course a zillion other borrowers worldwide but they're all much smaller and suffer from a variety of other structural problems. If you need to deploy a huge amount of capital with low risk and high liquidity then US treasuries are still the only realistic option.
Sure, but that premium would still be in dollars; until the world realizes that the US is using the primacy of the dollar as a reason to do whatever they want...
What you point out here is a major weakness in the typical US citizen's understanding of where US wealth and power comes from.
The US prints two kinds of dollars, the regular kind, then the T-bills.
T-bills get exchanged like dollars, investors/governments buy them because they are thought to be as stable as dollars, but also bear a bit of yield. The US benefits by printing T-bills over dollars because merely by changing the current interest rate, they change the dollar supply. Increasing interest rates lower the value of T-bills, decreasing the supply of dollars (as Silicon Valkey Bank found out...). This allows the US currency to remain very stable.
Referring to the $40T of T-bills merely as "debt" is quite deceptive. It's the global currency. You need enough currency out there to represent the actual amount of wealth, otherwise the values of dollars increases, and deflation is the only thing worse than inflation.
The US' $2T budget deficit is basically the rest of the world paying the US for the privilege of using US currency. The US is printing money, and getting the benefits of spending, because the rest of the world needs dollars to transact. They send us goods, we send them printed dollars. And then we get a president who calls this situation bad, because he doesn't understand what a "trade deficit" is. Utter insanity to have such a position and then just throw it all away.
>deflation is the only thing worse than inflation.
In any empirical sense this is absolutely false. The only instance of a significant negative instance of deflation was its contribution to the Great Depression in the early nineteen hundreds, and the effect of that was minor compared to the effects of extreme inflation (hyperinflation) that occurred in places like Weimar Germany and Zimbabwe. Deflation is inherently self-limiting because people have a baseline of goods they must consume for survival (housing, food etc.), and once that baseline is reached spending does not fall further; there's not a single instance in history of 99% deflation, while 99%, 999% and even 999999999% inflation has happened within even just the past few decades.
> the Great Depression in the early nineteen hundreds, and the effect of that was minor compared to the effects of extreme inflation (hyperinflation) that occurred in places like Weimar Germany and Zimbabwe.
Millions unemployed, dependent on soup lines for survival, and their families living in makeshift shanty towns, is "minor"? Children were sold to provide subsistence. Generational wealth, from industries to family farms, were erased.
> people have a baseline of goods they must consume for survival (housing, food etc.), and once that baseline is reached spending does not fall further
Oh boy, do I have news for you. It is in fact possible to run out of money, and in a deflating economy with no jobs you can't just go out and earn more. It puts peoples' collective backs against the wall -- at which point they decide to fight like cornered animals rather than die in a corner, and things get nasty.
Inflation crises are awful, but when you run out of money there are jobs and you can get more and this generally prevents them from turning into bloodbaths. This is why we collectively decided to err in this direction.
Weimar Germany is the perfect example. Did it suck? Yeah. Savings were incinerated, everyday activities became market speculation, the memes are all true -- but it happened under nearly full employment and once the root causes were addressed everything largely simmered down. This is in stark contrast to the deflationary shock of the Great Depression later that decade which propelled the Nazis into power and led directly to WWII.
99% deflation doesn't happen because people start killing each other long before then.
Vance is making this idea popular/mainstream again lately, I wonder why? The US will predictably lose reserve-currency status as a consequence of losing all the rest of the trust and good will available to her, so it's time to make it seem like that was the plan all along.
Sure, there was a serious conversation to be had about this at some point, but it was probably before stacking up tons of unsustainable debt that directly depends on that part of the shell game. And there are many things that can/should change, but in a certain way and at a certain time to avoid pain and chaos. Arguing "this was always bad for us, fuck it" is kind of a pattern now, right? When someone wants to change some things, great, everything sucks. But when someone wants to tear down every status quo, and especially the ones that they apparently benefited from while saying "everyone after me doesn't need it", then it's a pretty clear sign.
US is now a lot of crazy old people finding new ways to eat their children and trying to see the world burn before they check out. They created the bulk of the debt, benefited from it immensely, propped it up with collateral that was always kind of imaginary, continue to increase the debt. Not great, but now we are also proposing to just destroy what's left of that thin collateral? I don't know how to explain that with greed or stupidity even, it just seems like spite.
> US is now a lot of crazy old people finding new ways to eat their children and trying to see the world burn before they check out. They created the bulk of the debt, benefited from it immensely, propped it up with collateral that was always kind of imaginary, continue to increase the debt. Not great, but now we are also proposing to just destroy what's left of that thin collateral? I don't know how to explain that with greed or stupidity even, it just seems like spite.
And is your proposal to just hope to be one of the next generation who still can eat their children? Or better yet, the children of those who didn't make it before the ladder was pulled up?
Nothing there explains why it's a bad deal for the middle class.
The middle class actually benefits the most from this situation! More goods, more government services, etc. How much more? Just add up all the trade deficits, that's all benefit accrued almost entirely to the middle class.
It is explained in the Alden piece, section "The Fraying of the Petrodollar System", subsection "The Triffin Dilemma Unfolds".
What I meant was "blue collar working class" as opposed to the neo-artistocrat professional class. The Triffin Dilemma is a contributor to the K shaped economy and rise of populism.
>And from there, the value of the system depends on who you ask. Folks who are often on the higher end of the income spectrum who worked in finance, government, healthcare, or technology benefitted from this system, since they obtained many of the benefits of globalization and none of the drawbacks. Folks who are often on the lower end of the income spectrum, specifically those that make physical things, are the ones that benefitted least and gave the most up, since their jobs were outsourced and automated at a faster rate than other developed countries. But now with China also undermining the structure of the system, even the geopolitical/hegemonic benefits for the political class are subverted as well.
I guess I'm not seeing anything tying the trade deficit to the destruction of unions, to the massive reduction in top tax rates resulting in higher CEO compensation, etc.
The piece puts increasing trade deficits next to lots of stuff about increasing inequality, but it does not make the case that trade deficits are the cause of increasing inequality.
There's a person that had a job making physical things, but they are not inherently a "person that only makes physical things." The idea that bringing back the making of physical things will make these people wealthier is, well, suspicious. Unions? Better taxations systems? Modernizing manufacturing so that each worker is far more productive and we can compete with the world? That may help. But reducing trade deficits will not fix any of the K shaped economy.
A current account deficit is a capital account surplus.
We can pay for imports with things we make or things we own. To a first approximation, making things employs people and owning things does not. If we pay with things we make, our economy employs people. If we pay with things we own, the jobs disappear while stocks/bonds/real estate soar.
If you want the whole story from an actual economist, read "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis.
You're missing the third thing we pay with: T-bills. We literally print money. That's it. We didn't give up anything we own. We didn't give up anything we made. We printed money, because there needs to be enough currency to represent the ever growing wealth of the world and the world has chosen the US dollar as the reserve currency, to the great benefit of the US.
You're missing that the T-bills are replacing exports (including services) that would otherwise have had to happen to support the imports, and that the latter employs people while the former doesn't.
The benefit is to the US in aggregate but is a detriment to most US citizens, since most US citizens get their money primarily from working rather than from owning assets. But for the minority of people who mostly get their money from owning assets, this is brilliant, I agree.
> Modernizing manufacturing so that each worker is far more productive and we can compete with the world
How does this not correspond directly to reduced trade deficits? In this scenario the US is either sourcing more of what it needs internally, and thereby importing less, or it is more competitive globally and therefore exporting more, or both.
That would be a necessary condition for manufacturing-based reduction of inequality.
But manufacturing is not a way to decrease inequality unless there's massive massive other sorts of changes going with it.
In fact destroying the higher paying jobs to replace them with lower paying jobs in the US will heighten the inequality. And that's what's happening right now.
It certainly can't be leading to more government services. We get less every year. There might be more spending, but there's fewer results. We can't build trains, our police don't stop crime, healthcare covers less and costs more every year.
So which do you choose? Yuan carries Chinese geopolitical risk, Yen, probably not enough of it in the world plus Japan keeps trying to devalue, Euro maybe, but there's plenty of geopolitical risk there with Russia on the doorstep and shifting politics...
Plus if everyone doesn't choose the same it's less convenient.
You make sound like we're stuck with it, but the franc and the sterling pound used to have a similar role for a few centuries each... these things change.
Didn't say we're stuck with it, just at this exact moment there's no obvious replacement.
If China ever replaces Xi and the next generation takes a softer stance on a bunch of stuff it'll be a shoe in, but right now they're weirdly belligerent.
They're quite softer in all kinds of stuff. The US is run by an aggressive madman and neocon/MIC combo in comparison (tarrifs, trade blackmail, Greenland, straight of Hormuz, the list goes on).
Russia is going to have a very hard time directly attacking the Eurozone without also hitting NATO home soil - which through Article 5 would also pull in plenty of non-Euro countries, including the United States. Besides, shoveling never-ending piles of cash into the furnace of the War Machine doesn't seem to have hurt the dollar?
As to shifting politics: The EU is famously extremely hard to move.
The European Council decides the political direction and consists of the heads of state of the member countries; the European Commission is the executive cabinet and needs buy-in from the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament; the Council of the European Union is made up from ministers of the member states and each member state has a veto right on all foreign policy proposed by the European Commission; the European Parliament's members are directly elected through independent elections in the individual member states with proportional representation, and any policy proposed by the European Commission also needs a majority here; the Court of Justice of the European Union's General Court oversees this and is composed of two judges appointed by each member state for a renewable six-year period and reviewed by an independent committee.
In other words: nothing gets done fast, and nothing gets done without buy-in from a lot of people with very opposed political goals. Quite different from a country like, say, the United States, where the loser of the popular vote routinely becomes president, is handed God-Emperor levels of power, and is virtually impossible to unseat - leaving the foreign policies of a nuclear superpower to be decided by how a single person felt when he stepped out of his bed this morning.
> Russia is going to have a very hard time directly attacking the Eurozone without also hitting NATO home soil - which through Article 5 would also pull in plenty of non-Euro countries, including the United States
Will it? The Russians blew up an ammunition depot in Czechia without consequences. A cruise missile hit Poland and it was swept under the rug. Numerous acts of sabotage and Europe's done nothing. Now a drone attack in Germany and they're again, responding extremely weakly.
The only rational takeaway is that NATO is weak. If Russia attacks Latvia will the US go to war? Not s chance.
> Russia is going to have a very hard time directly attacking the Eurozone without also hitting NATO home soil - which through Article 5 would also pull in plenty of non-Euro countries, including the United States.
That's the plan, but under Glorious Leader? Not clear which side he would attack (or possibly neither).
The US isn’t taking money from other countries - you clearly don’t understand the scam!
We give money to Israel, Ukraine, and everyone else - we print and print and print and a few people close to the action take some off the top.
That’s it. Maybe some rich kids get their university debt wiped clean (not community college though).
The US and even local governments within have become corrupted to the core - they are like ATMs and havens of various types for the emerging international wealth class.
That class may very well want to promote your idea since the best seat at the table right now is China.
Now everyone wants to be owed by the US à la China, it’s been great for international business. Mexico is the heir to that throne more than Europe - which doesn’t produce anything the world wants.
Saying sorry means admitting guilt.
If there’s guilt there some level of harm.
If there’s harm you can be sued.
Avoiding being sued due to causing harm usually means increased costs, because you now need to take care you didn’t take before.
Higher cost means you’re less competitive.
Being less competitive makes you less attractive investment target.
So as always it’s all about money.
Saying sorry == lower share price.
I find it particularly bad at writing test comments, I usually start fixing bugs by adding regression tests and Opus tend to put story into comments for these, including “but it fails because…” followed by bug description including line numbers and call chains. It just lives to narrate everything
Discovered a new legit CVE today during a meeting with some other engineers. I’m going to make sure the one who originally brought it up gets to put it on his résumé. The world needs more people like that.
It’s not perfect, it has shortcomings, it sometimes produces bogus outputs. All of that is fine for a tool, it’s not fine when it pretends it’s a conscious being, because errors start to feel like lies and it becomes a bit too personal.
People want it to be Data from Star Trek, when it really should be the ship's computer. I want to tell it to run a simulation accurately, create some solved tool, etc.
I don't think there's any correction that can return LLMs to a purely tool-space. Too many AI boyfriend/girlfriends.
You can want your e-scooter to be a jet ski, but you'll wind up having issues when you try to use it as one. LLMs are _really good_ at pretending to be something they aren't, but not always so good at being that thing, so you should be careful what you ask for.
The difference is what happens when you come to depend on it. Do you want your airplane to be flown by a pilot, or someone who's so good at talking like a pilot that they can fool almost everyone?
If they are only good at pretending to TALK like a pilot, then of course that is bad. However, if it is so good at pretending to BE a pilot that it can actually fly the plain really well, then that is good enough.
He may be able to talk the talk, and walk the walk, but today's guest pilot has a crippling heroin addiction. Let's hope that auto-landing system works.
No because then the non-deterministic grifter Data tells you to kill yourself.
Data is an individual. LLMs are time-shared hallucinatory algorithms that will ultimately be used to sell ad space.
It is Stupid to create "the machine that melts people's brains", but these assholes are trying to sell you "the machine that melts people's brains" and love to market it as being "anything the user wants".
I think the problem is that we’ve anthropomorphised the LLMs in their training and through system prompts to the point that that seems reasonable.
We don’t thank our other tools like grep, or the compiler.
If you train your LLM to produce words that seem like human responses or conversations, they will. If you train them to seem like god-like superintelligences to people who think that’s what they’re creating, they will.
I think a lot of that is people who were always very insecure because they’re mediocre engineers. Previously asking questions or not understanding something was a bit painful but now you can hear “you’re absolutely right!” and make progress all day every day.
Until you need to interact with actual humans and that’s why you try to minimise it, hiding behind ai generated content.
I’m not a developer, but when I watch devs whose work process is prompt, copy-paste, try to run, paste error into code, try to run, etc. I can’t help but think they’re unskilled. There’s no brain engagement, no understanding of the bigger picture, just being a worse slower agent.
Sure, but even worse, is the state-of-the-art: they use a cli agent and the "copy-paste, try to run, paste error, try to run" loop is called "Agentic engineering." Now we have to believe they're 10/10?
I see no difference there except speed at the cost of whatever little understanding may have been gained by the manual inspection between steps.
Any competent developer knows there are limits to prompting.
Personally I've found LLM's suck at multi-threaded applications. (Because I've been tempted by the ~agentic loop~ and been burned. Then I hand code the core logic and all is well).
Woe to the developer who tries to prompt their way through this.
They suck at multi-threading, they suck at maintaining a coherent goal through multiple files, they suck at basic math (claude could NOT figure out how to get the hypotenuse of a triangle given angle and side lengths...).
Sometimes I mess around with prompts just to see what I get back, more often than not, it's mostly a waste of time. God forbid you use it to refactor anything.
I hit a wall with creating a browser based video editor. Up until then, over the last year, I have been taking my hands off the wheel more and more and really have just become more and more productive. This video editor experience has forced me to get more into the code again.
But seriously, lots of apps are just glorified NextJS apps which have tons of training data. Something like rust would likely churn out nonsense that compiles eventually but isn't optimal.
Agreed with the caveat that I think if you know what you're doing and are very cognizant, LLM generated Rust is amazing. I feel like it's hard compilation requirements gives a guardrails for a LLM and if it compiles, you're pretty safe against memory issues.
Maybe it's because my org gave us permission to fail and make mistakes, but I transitioned to AI driven development pretty quickly and am having fun learning how to best drive the AI to produce good quality code, with harnesses and patterns to prevent mistakes and a process to learn and rollback. It's a different kind of engineering now. I find myself thinking more product level and system level than if else branches. I think I've been able to upskill in ways that I wouldn't have been able to if I were still writing code by hand, mainly because I have the bandwidth to do so now.
I only have 10 years of experience, so I'm not trying to say that your lived experience is invalid, but personally I figure if this is the way the industry is heading then I may as well try to learn how to thrive within the new environment.
A lot of the joy I used to have doing this job is gone. I wrote some recursive code to turn nested API parameters into Elastic search queries, it was the last really cool thing I did pre-Ai. Sometimes I look at that code with a fond nostalgia, I'll never write code like that again unless I go out of my way to do it for fun. I don't even know what being a software dev will look like in a year from now.
This is my biggest problem with the current state of things. The loss in quality of life out weights the gains in productivity. And they are concentrated on highly conscientiousness individuals, those who already got silently taxed with most of the 80% of the work to get the last 20% of the results. So it is now compounding, if you care your workload will approximate 99,99..% of the total workload divided by the number of high conscientiousness individuals in your team/organization.
The current hype cycle might even represent a net global gain like some people argue. But it represents yet more externality driven exploitation. Remains to be seen what the new equilibrium will be given that now the population being exploited is not only close to the core of the world system but also already overburdened.
I do think it represents a mere acceleration of the previous trend that resulted since around 2005 in an explosion of average (not median) pay for software developers due to similar dynamics. If the system settles on a new level of pay that manages to convince enough people of enough skill to go along, it might just hum along and not implode. As for the rest of us, welcome to the growing permanent underclass and brace for the impact of the climate wars. We will be the fodder that will insulate the chosen ones under their air conditioned domes.
Someone very close to me is in their second year as a dev. I hope things don’t turn out as bad as it looks like it might. We are all going to need some luck here.
I'm in the same boat as you... 30 years of experience writing software, and now I'm just supposed to click "approve" on PRs without reading the PR. I'm just supposed to press a button. I'm looking for a new job, but it's going to be difficult to find one in tech that isn't a complete AI-psychosis shitshow.
Same. I'm being forced into a position where I'm supposed to do everything with AI agents, not write any manual code, and only act as a reviewer. It sounds like you know the drill. It may push me into early retirement.
The last straw (of many last straws) was over the weekend a co-worker sent me a chat "hey can you click approve on this PR real quick?". This only makes me click "Apply" (jobs) instead of "Approve".
I've been clicking apply myself, but only have had a few interviews. It's bad out there. I've been working since the late 90's and this is the worst job market I've seen in decades.
I mean, we're just the neo-luddites in this case. Or maybe the rust belt when jobs moved elsewhere.
The real question isn't if things are going to change around our jobs, its are we going to be able to move fast enough to avoid starving in the streets?
Yeah, the economy wants a dystopia, so we're just gonna have to let that happen industry by industry, calling each group that is exploited for maximal corporate gain a neo-luddite. Inevitability and whatnot. Hell, we're gonna die one day anyway, that's also inevitable, so we might as well all just drink the Kool-Aid too.
I think I’m pretty skilled, or at least I was, but much of my work now looks like this. The fact is in many cases Claude can diagnose and fix the issue quicker than I can even read it. It would be crazy not to take advantage of this. Of course it does get hard to resist the temptation to just become ever lazier over time.
This is my exact process nowadays when debugging some weird Linux wifi driver issue or something that came up after upgrade.
But that's because I don't have any real familiarity with the systems involved and I don't expect that gaining such familiarity will benefit me. If I am working on a system or product I'm responsible for at my job, it should be a different situation.
This is a sign of poor harness configuration and/or org level constraints (lack of MCP support, etc.) With properly configured and prompted agents error copy-pasta should be the exception not the norm.
Over the past year maybe 1.5x to 2.0x for me. As in: I can work on two projects at the same time with reduced amount of context switch. But that's it for me.
Maybe I don't have the brains for 1000x terminal agent coding, but 2 parallel projects seems like my saturation point.
I do believe there's a tiny subset of people who are more productive with AI, in the same way that Erdős was more productive with amphetamine.
But most who keep on going about their 10x productivity gain are indistinguishable from that one obnoxious guy at a party who won't shut up about his Ayahuasca retreat last spring. And they think they're Erdős.
this is a great metaphor precisely because (outside those with paradoxical stimulant response) everyone thinks they're more productive on amphetamines and there's some naive evidence to that effect. the number of things you've actually done is significantly higher. the change in value created, as measured by the decrease in distance between where you are and the the goal you're shooting for, is unpredictable at best and slowly degrades as reliance increases.
AI is like having a junior dev with an adderall addiction and an encyclopedic knowledge of coding syntax at your beck and call.
The ones who get more productive are either the very incompetent who get pulled up to the AI-floor level, or the very competent who know when and how to use it and for what. The midwits are too proud to use it and instead placate themselves that their precious skill is more special and immune to mechanization than it really is.
Many many people have jobs where their contribution is granting access to deliberately undocumented things, like knowing where the config files are and some such. They hate the idea of AI. For my non IT friends its great for diagnosing wifi issues. It's also great for competent network engineers. It's not great for those who gain a salary due to having memorized some actions or settings that they don't even understand much. Note that this group has also already resisted traditional script automation, just like US dock workers who resist automation.
I would bet real cash money that many many people, including your coworkers, think that anyone who unironically uses the term "midwit" is completely and totally obnoxious.
Recently saw a podcast about the rise of "AI midwits". The guy's point was that it's good to become a midwit, because it's a stage between knowing nothing and knowing a lot, but an AI midwit just has the aesthetics of a midwit and none of the actual knowledge and is stuck there.
But I don't remember how he defined a midwit, because podcasts are a terrible way to convey knowledge. It might've been something like someone who acts like they know everything.
People who uses the word "obnoxious" are also obnoxious. There are many unpleasant words, you have to use some of them and people don't like any of them.
Would you refer to someone as a midwit in a typical office environment and expect your professional reputation to remain intact? If you were to do this on an ongoing basis for whatever reason, how long before you're asked to have a little chat with the folks in HR? Would you then attempt to explain it away as one of those unpleasant words that you just had to use? I want to be there for that conversation.
Corporate offices are low trust environments where people do not really openly speak directly in any negative way (for basically the reason you've illustrated), so I wouldn't use them as any kind of standard for normal social interaction.
> I wouldn't use them as any kind of standard for normal social interaction
Workplaces are where many of us spend a large percentage of our waking lives. So, it is "normal," unfortunately. This is why HR language and norms have broken containment into the non-work world. (Whether that's a good thing is another question.)
Different context, different politeness rules. I bet you're fun at parties. An online forum is a relaxed space, like a town pub. HR isn't breathing down our necks here. Personal attacks are a different sort of thing. Using a word to describe in a comment some abstract situations and kinds of characters you see at the office is not a personal attack.
There is not one single discourse norm to rule them all and calling out every little thing as too offensive is just annoying. Yeah, yeah there are no midwits, everyone is a unique little genius flower, yeah.
People apparently can get a very different picture of the same site. Anti-AI people think this site's commenters are mostly pro-AI and vice versa. I'm generally pro-using-AI-in-proper-ways, and mostly have the impression that people on here tend to complain and grumble about AI mostly and are generally skeptical and dismissive of everything which is right in the HN tradition (the famous Dropbox comment etc).
Karpathy, Carmack, Terence Tao, Simon Willison etc. are all smart people and manage to use AI effectively and productively because it doesn't hurt their ego.
It's also very easy to dismiss everyone falling into the "AI trap" as being mediocre in the first place, though. But one just can't know this without having seen their work pre-AI.
I think the "meat proxy" people are mediocre regardless of whether or not the were brilliant pre-AI. They've reduced themselves to a copy-paste go-between for claude and slack (or github or jira or whatever) and are mediocre now. If only they could turn back the clock...
Some skills are easy re-pick-uppable, like bicycling. Mathematics is probably more challenging. Not sure about programming, especially "borint" business-like programming.
There's a reason games like Factorio or Exapunks are so popular among engineers!
Especially if you get a little burned out and can't bring yourself to contribute to a side project, but still want to do programming-ish things that get your brain moving
The fundamental skill can evolve. It used to be OOP mania as promoted by Uncle Bob, now it's Casey Muratori DOD. At least that's been my perception. I'm sure there was sometimes before Uncle Bob too, but I wasn't alive. I did however learn OOP in school, class collaboration cards or whatever they're called, and then learn why it all needs to be thrown out the window after finishing school.
Casey also pointed out three kinds of programmers: those who just want to get something done and will use an LLM because it's faster, those who actually like programming, and those who actually like LLMs. Last group always gets left out of these discussions.
(Just as importantly to note - Bob-style OOP was just fine on microprocessors of the 80s with no caches. The state of the industry has changed.)
I think people tend to forget that not only do we ourselves have different skillsets and can be amazing at one thing but horrible but another, but this also applies to other people in the world! Far all we know, there is an amazing developer out there who without LLMs, might have been the single best developer in the country, but even this person might not be able to figure out how to effectively work with LLMs. And vice-versa too.
Maybe this «spearheading AI person» just sucks at AI related stuff, as clearly that approach is bananas, but they could still be a OK developer.
> Far all we know, there is an amazing developer out there who without LLMs, might have been the single best developer in the country, but even this person might not be able to figure out how to effectively work with LLMs. And vice-versa too.
If working with LLMs effectively means accepting subpar results or be a reverse centaur, then I’d be glad not to be able to work with them.
I’ve never seen a good example where AI is a net positive to any development workflow. No one argues against compilers, build tools, IDEs, task runners, deploy and orchestration tools. Because they are great levers that lets you create more with less effort.
Many developers have narrow job descriptions, and the creative, productive uses of AI aren’t really obvious.
Where it shines is glueing systems together or building one-off automations that would take days, or weeks, to figure out. It’s for things you don’t have time to figure out or didn’t think were possible.
I'll argue against half that stuff because you probably don't need it. Do you need kubernetes or does "scp service.exe server: && ssh server systemctl restart service" work for you? GitHub Actions is the worst thing I've ever had to work with and I'd rather have a shell script. What is a task runner, is it an overcomplicated way to SSH?
> If working with LLMs effectively means accepting subpar results
Why would it mean that? That's one way of using them, sure. Personally, my code is better as I have more time to think about the software design than before, and I'm less avoidant of refactoring in my personal projects.
> I’ve never seen a good example where AI is a net positive to any development workflow
Alright, does that mean you also believe it's impossible then that anyone out there is using AI in a "net positive" way for their development workflow? Or just that you've never seen it, but you're open to it existing?
> Or just that you've never seen it, but you're open to it existing?
This one. Only a sith deals in absolute.
I don’t mind experiments to try to find methodologies for those tools. And I believe there are instances where they’ve been successfully used. The issue I have is the kind of generic statements that they are good enough to replace currently established methodologies. Like using AI is a panacea.
> Personally, my code is better as I have more time to think about the software design than before, and I'm less avoidant of refactoring in my personal projects
That’s a bit what I’m talking about. Have you investigated how it has helped you? And if there are other, more economical way to get the same result? Your statement seems more ritualistic than logical.
> Have you investigated how it has helped you? And if there are other, more economical way to get the same result?
No I haven't, but I'm happy to just freeform walk you through my thinking on it: I typically write (wrote?) software for two purposes: consulting/freelancing for others so building what others want, or for simplifying and making my own life easier and more enjoyable. "Stupid" stuff like Home Assistant for example, isn't really life-or-death, or Jellyfin for that matter, both things my family relies on now, but our daily life just gets easier all throughout the day when everything works in sync with what we're doing.
It used to be I had to make a decision what to spend time on, either I work on my professional stuff so we have enough money to survive (maybe more) and I get new challenges and all that, or I spend time improving and maintaining my home infrastructure, or whatever software I feel like I'd need to be better at doing my professional development.
I no longer am making that choice, I'm spending less time in front of the computer, yet the output and quality of my work remains the same, and the code and design when I look at it, even stuff I shipped 6 months ago, I'm still happy with how the code is, which for me I guess is the way I validate if what I produce is good enough.
Nowadays, my entire home-lab is configured with Nix and almost everything except my workstation and some random stuff, runs NixOS. Everything is hosted on a local Forgejo instance, which also has it's own (custom "written" of course) agent acting on issues and PRs, and I have my harness basically maintain my entire home lab at this point. Now I just open issues, have a conversation until everything is 100% clear, end up with a PR to review and merge if it looks good, and I can do this while juggling other things.
I agree with you that there are tons of people who are selling LLMs as a panacea to lots of things, and there is so much over-hype in the industry and ecosystem, I also feel like every "new thing" kind of comes with this type of almost scamming, which sucks, and makes it hard to discern from real positive opinions vs just regurgitated opinions someone read somewhere. I'm not sure what the answer to that is, except perhaps as what you say, only a sith deals in absolutes.
What are the exact "currently established methodologies" you're talking about that cannot be replaced by LLMs + a harness today, just as some examples? You're probably right that those exists, but I'm curious to hear what you think would be the most difficult to replace today.
> What are the exact "currently established methodologies" you're talking about that cannot be replaced by LLMs + a harness today, just as some examples? You're probably right that those exists, but I'm curious to hear what you think would be the most difficult to replace today.
I was explaining [0] under another post that programming is mostly translation works. You take a specs and you formalize it using code, like going from sketch to a proper engineering drawing. Software design is more creative, where you take a problem and then comes up with a solution (creating the specs). Software Engineering is ensuring that those two are done well enough while consuming the least resources.
So a program is always a formal system. It's also static. It will be executed by a computer which will actually have a tangible effect in the real world. That effect is what's valuable. The program is the seed which let us control that effect. Aka it's the map that let us plan the journey, but it's not the territory that we will have to travel in.
The issue I keep pointing in most of my comment is thinking that the map is the territory. That the novel are the words and not the story so we need more words. Or that the code is more important than the user' workflows, se we are adding more buggy code, while not ensuring that the workflows are undisturbed.
> Nowadays, my entire home-lab is configured with Nix and almost everything except my workstation and some random stuff, runs NixOS. Everything is hosted on a local Forgejo instance, which also has it's own (custom "written" of course) agent acting on issues and PRs, and I have my harness basically maintain my entire home lab at this point.
It's also highlighted here where you focus more on the process than the output here. The goal is to have a working homelab. NixOS managing it is only the process (accidental complexity). If it's where truly about the goal and not NixOS and using AI, by this point, adding new nodes (software, devices,...) should be as easy as selecting it and adding it to the current system, like a strategy game.
You can see that philosophy in OpenBSD, where the focus is to have a working OS, not to work on developing an OS. A lot of software are done and it's mostly just bug fixing every once in a while. You can also see the same attitude in industrial engineering where you develop a solution and then use it for years. You don't spend all your time tweaking it and thus disturbing the production flow.
So yes, when I see a LLM methodology, it's mostly about the work itself, not the output of the work. There is no definition of done or even the idea of having one. It's work for the purpose of working.
I think many people did argue against these things when they were new. Compilers, for instance, were seen as a waste of the computer's resources and produced less than optimal code.
That argument still stands, and is still right. Compilers do allow for some programmers to remain uninformed about the actual behaviour of the code they write and this has allowed for a number of actual harms in the outcome of code. (see: Fujitsu computers floating point errors and the British Postal System's persecution of her own Postmasters as one example among many cases) Also, the most performant code either has to be written such that a compiler doesn't incorrectly unroll it's loops or otherwise mangle the intent, or it has to be fine tuned after the fact to correct such mangling. Even Linus does this for the kernel in some cases.
So, drawing the parallel, 'these are the new garbage' but 'old garbage became acceptable so we should accept the new garbage' as an argument in support of being a meat proxy for Markovian stochastic lossy compression-decompression chatbots is isn't very persuasive, especially among this community with a greater concentration of systems level programmers than the general population.
That being said, i think both chatbots and compilers have a specific level of utility; neither of them should have unrestricted access to production filesystems or networks. That way be dragons.
They were right. Only after quite a lot of evolution did they start being wrong. And they're still not that good at SIMD. ffmpeg still uses assembly-code kernels.
Eh. The useful LLM usage I see is in internal tools (bugs don’t matter because the output or UI is the only thing that counts and they are throw away) or personal projects that otherwise wouldn’t exist.
Both of these can be quite invisible. But the benefit is there.
All paradigm shifts and regime changes happen because of a coalition of people that have nothing to gain and everything to lose by the current system.
But I think we should decouple mediocrity from laziness. I haven't seen any team invest in the mentorship required to develop juniors in years, for example.
The incentives for developing juniors have become misaligned as the expected stay in a company dwindled from decades to years to maybe year.
It would make sense to develop juniors if most of their comp was a four year vest but that doesn't happen until later. And in your first year or two you're usually a net negative... This is even more true with AI.
To be fair it’s also worth noting that it’s much easier to find a buggy edge case with existing code than it is to write bug free code that doesn’t have any edge cases at all. It’s so much easier to read some concrete logic and find holes in it, than it is to start from nothing and end up with perfection. It’s true both for humans and agents, but agents are better are validating correctness.
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