I think it's a foregone conclusion that the clankers are the only ones building something in OP's scenario, leaving nothing left for us meatbags to do but fight the battery bloods and write bad science fiction.
> If it did work, well, the oldest trick in computer science is writing compilers, i suppose we will just have to write an English to pedantry compiler.
"Add tests to this function" for GPT-3.5-era models was much less effective than "you are a senior engineer. add tests for this function. as a good engineer, you should follow the patterns used in these other three function+test examples, using this framework and mocking lib." In today's tools, "add tests to this function" results in a bunch of initial steps to look in common places to see if that additional context already exists, and then pull it in based on what it finds. You can see it in the output the tools spit out while "thinking."
So I'm 90% sure this is already happening on some level.
But can you see the difference if you only include "you are a senior engineer"? It seems like the comparison you're making is between "write the tests" and "write the tests following these patterns using these examples. Also btw you’re an expert. "
Today’s llms have had a tonne of deep rl using git histories from more software projects than you’ve ever even heard of, given the latency of a response I doubt there’s any intermediate preprocessing, it’s just what the model has been trained to do.
But why believe that when their policy says any of it may not be true, or could change at any time?
Even if the CEO believes it right now, what if the team responsible for the automatic-deletion merely did a soft-delete instead of a hard delete "just in case we want to use it for something else one day"?
> 2 - Dario and Dwarkesh were openly chatting about how the total addressable market (TAM) for AI is the entirety of human labor market (i.e. your wage). First is the replacement of white-collar labor, then blue-collar labor once robotics is solved. On the road to AGI, your employment, and the ability to feed your family, is a minor nuisance. The value of your mental labor will continue to plummet in the coming years.
Seems like a TAM of near-0. Who's buying any of the product of that labor anymore? 1% of today's consumer base that has enough wealth to not have to work?
The end-game of "optimize away all costs until we get to keep all the revenue" approaches "no revenue." Circulation is key.
It seems like they have the same blind spot as anyone else: AI will disrupt everything—except for them, and they get that big TAM! Same for all the "entrepreneurs will be able to spin up tons of companies to solve problems for people more directly" takes. No they wouldn't, people would just have the problems solved for themselves by the AI, and ignore your sales call.
Coding is a relatively verifiable and strict task: it has to pass the compiler, it has to pass the test suite, it has to meet the user's requests.
There are a lot of white-collar tasks that have far lower quality and correctness bars. "Researching" by plugging things into google. Writing reports summarizing how a trend that an exec saw a report on can be applied to the company. Generating new values to share at a company all-hands.
Tons of these that never touch the "real world." Your assistant story is like a coding task - maybe someone ran some tests, maybe they didn't, but it was verifiable. No shortage of "the tests passed, but they weren't the right test, this broke some customers and had to be fixed by hand" coding stories out there like it. There are pages and pages of unverifiable bullshit that people are sleepwalking through, too, though.
Nobody already knows if those things helped or hurt, so nobody will ever even notice a hallucination.
But everyone in all those fields is going to be trying really really hard to enumerate all the reasons it's special and AI won't work well for them. The "management says do more, workers figure out ways to be lazier" see-saw is ancient, but this could skew far towards "management demands more from fewer people" spectrum for a while.
Code may have to compile but that's a lowish bar and since the AI is writing the tests it's obvious that they're going to pass.
In all areas where there's less easy ways to judge output there is going to be correspondingly more value to getting "good" people. Some AI that can produce readable reports isn't "good" - what matters is the quality of the work and the insight put into it which can only be ensured by looking at the workers reputation and past history.
> since the AI is writing the tests it's obvious that they're going to pass
That's not obvious at all if the AI writing the tests is different than the AI writing the code being tested. Put into an adversarial and critical mode, the same model outputs very different results.
IMO the reason neither of them can really write entirely trustworthy tests is that they don't have domain knowledge so they write the test based on what the code does plus what they extract from some prompts rather than based on some abstract understanding of what it should do given that it's being used e.g. in a nuclear power station or for promoting cat videos or in a hospital or whatever.
Obviously this is only partially true but it's true enough.
It takes humans quite a long time to learn the external context that lets them write good tests IMO. We have trouble feeding enough context into AIs to give them equal ability. One is often talking about companies where nobody bothers to write down more than 1/20th of what is needed to be an effective developer. So you go to some place and 5 years later you might be lucky to know 80% of the context in your limited area after 100s of meetings and talking to people and handling customer complaints etc.
Yes, some kind of spec is always needed, and if the human programmer only has the spec in their head, then that's going to be a problem, but it's a problem for teams of humans as well.
Even if its a different session it can be enough. But that said i had times where it rewrote tests "because my implementation was now different so the tests needed to be updated"
so you have to prompt even that to tell it to not touch the tests.
We’ve had the sycophant problem for as long as people have held power over other people, and the answer has always been “put 3-5 workers in a room and make them compete for the illusion of favor.”
I have been doing this with coding agents across LLM providers for a while now, with very successful results. Grok seems particularly happy to tell Anthropic where it’s cutting corners, but I get great insights from O3 and Gemini too.
Taste is both driven by tools and independent of it.
It's driven by it in the sense that better tools and the democratization of them changes people's baseline expectations.
It's independent of it in that doing the baseline will not stand out. Jurassic Park's VFX stood out in 1993. They wouldn't have in 2003. They largely would've looked amateurish and derivative in 2013 (though many aspects of shot framing/tracking and such held up, the effects themselves are noticeably primitive).
Art will survive AI tools for that reason.
But commerce and "productivity" could be quite different because those are rarely about taste.
> Their goal is to monopolize labor for anything that has to do with i/o on a computer, which is way more than SWE. Its simple, this technology literally cannot create new jobs it simply can cause one engineer (or any worker whos job has to do with computer i/o) to do the work of 3, therefore allowing you to replace workers (and overwork the ones you keep). Companies don't need "more work" half the "features"/"products" that companies produce is already just extra. They can get rid of 1/3-2/3s of their labor and make the same amount of money, why wouldn't they.
Most companies have "want to do" lists much longer than what actually gets done.
I think the question for many will be is it actually useful to do that. For instance, there's only so much feature-rollout/user-interface churn that users will tolerate for software products. Or, for a non-software company that has had a backlog full of things like "investigate and find a new ERP system", how long will that backlog be able to keep being populated.
They're saying a cocktail shouldn't cost double digits.
They're saying they can't afford doctors or health insurance.
The complaints are specific about specific changes in affordability, not 80's AM radio talking points. They mostly aren't suddenly saying illegal immigrants are taking their jobs.
(Certainly some people are, but it's not really a bigger contingent than any other time in the last... 30? 40? years...)
But they are also saying no to build more houses. They are also screaming and clamoyring to tariff the world 500 percent and then some more. Many people say many things, many people are also economically and mathematically illiterate and or pretending to be due to some vested interest.
I think there comes a point when people are so adamantly illiterate and antimathematical (and a good helping of other fun things like racism), they are beyond help.
And a computer in 1970 would've been way more expensive and far crappier than a hundred dollar Android tablet today. It's not exactly in dispute that there has been technological development between 1970 and 2025. But it's also not the central issue.
In America the personal vehicle is a necessity in the vast majority of the country, and it's relatively more expensive today. As are many other necessities.
(If you want we can quibble further and say a 17k used Rav 4 or Tacoma would be more reliable than a 1970 F-100 anyway blah blah blah blah the increased lifespan and availability of used cars causes new cars to have to go more upmarket blah blah blah... but the hedonic treadmill is also real and if you would've been living it up with a new car and a nice home with a 30min commute in the 70s, but today have a 10 year old car and an apartment with a 70min commute, you're not gonna feel good.)
Yes I agree they are MUCH more expensive relatively. But they are more expensive entirely by choice, not because of inflation or stagnant wages. People want better cars, and that costs more. The government demands lower emissions, that costs more. Safety costs more. There is no world where you get all that for the same percentage of income.
you would've been living it up with a new car and a nice home with a 30min commute
And you be killed or paralyzed after a fender bender. Death rate per 100,000,000 miles dropped from 5 in 1970 to 1.4 in 2023.
> People want better cars, and that costs more. The government demands lower emissions, that costs more. Safety costs more. There is no world where you get all that for the same percentage of income.
Hell, we did it with computers. Let's figure out how to do it in more places.
Isn't that supposed to be the main job of the economy? Increase productivity? So that we all get more for less? Make the pie bigger, don't just make your own slice bigger?
If there's "no world" where all that can happen, most of the "taxes will hurt innovation, actually" arguments fall EXTREMELY hollow. Let's connect a few dots:
- Streets are in disrepair
- You can't afford the lifestyle you used to (by "choice")
- It's far harder for people, especially the young, to find a job (many end up hiding on disability and such that didn't exist much several decades ago in the first place)
- The wealthy have more money, and proportionally more money, than any time in the last century
Maybe instead of choosing the more expensive car we should start choosing to put some of that money to use repairing our basic infrastructure and trying to increase whole-society productive output instead of bottom-line ROI.
It is happening with cars too, it just that features are being added even faster than the price can come down. If you wanted Ford F-150 in 1970, you could do most of it, but it would have been a multi-million dollar car. You get all that for 50k. You are getting a lot more per dollar.
This reminds me the housing discussing - a part of the affordability problem is that houses have gotten much bigger. And have air conditioning. And have to comply with strict building codes. And have to be fire safe.
Which is a problem. I know a people who would be happy with a smaller house, but there just aren't enough on the market, and the scarcity of them leads to bidding wars that drive the price up. Meanwhile huge houses sit on the market for months, because no one can afford them.
I don’t think this is true. Advancements in technology often make things possible that previously were not at any price. Engines, for example, are better than ever in part due to computer modeling that would have been impossible in the 70s. Same deal with aerodynamics, safety features, and a million other things. In the 70s, you couldn’t have those things for any price. They required decades of development in other sectors to open possibilities for automobiles.
Most technology on cars existed years or decades before the became commonplace and affordable enough to use outside racing or exotic cars.
Airbags were patented in the 1950s. Modern ABS in 1971. Fist electronic fuel injector in 1957. You could take the Formula 1 level technology of 1970, and with enough money, apply it to a pickup truck. It would be shockingly expensive - and not as good. T
hat's my point! You are getting so much more for your dollar today, even though prices have risen faster than inflation. You are getting a multi-million dollar truck for $50k.
> You are getting a multi-million dollar truck for $50k.
You’re not, though, because that truck never did and never could exist. A modern F-150 isn’t a 70s F1 car made cheap by new tech. This isn’t something you can wave away with an argument equivalent to “we put 1000 research points in the tech tree.”
When the US economy was working well, products got better and cheaper over time. Tech and increased labor productivity drove that. Now, tech and labor productivity has continued to increase, yet consumer prices have far outpaced inflation.
"A modern F-150 isn’t a 70s F1 car made cheap by new tech. "
Yes, it pretty much is. You have to consider technology in cars is moving on two seperate/distinct paths.
1: improving manufacturing processes, materials, quality, which is lowering prices over time. Megacasting aluminum car parts is an example.
2: Adding totally new complex parts and systems that cars didn't have. This is things like airbags, antilock breaks, infotainment system, catalytic converters. This adds to the total cost.
#2 is far outpacing #1, which is why prices of cars are going up faster than inflation, wages, etc.
Again, the old car comparison is demonstrably untrue. To put the same example forward, computer modeling has wildly changed and accelerated car design in ways that were impossible for any sum of money in the 70s.
I think part of why this is hard to believe is that people strongly believe in the concept that time is money. On the margins for decisions like hiring someone to mow your lawn, it is true. For large scale things, you often cannot accelerate processes no matter how much money you dump into it. A good example of this is how long it has taken China to industrialize.
To be clear also, you have to prove your point that #2 is outpacing #1. The fact that the price keeps going up is not proof as there are other explanations. The poor quality of domestic manufacturers and their bad business practices, for example.
> There is no world where you get all that for the same percentage of income.
There is if we are comparing 2026 to the 70s. Technology has increased productivity overall. If those gains were distributed more evenly, it is more likely that the cost of, say a car, would be similar to the same percentage of income.
Productivity is up ~3x since 1970, but the car price has gone up 25x. It is driven by the massive increase in features/complexity on cars, and that means it will cost a bigger percentage of income. There is no possible redistribution of gains that would have driven income up 25x to match the car prices.
> There is no world where you get all that for the same percentage of income.
This is only true because real income has barely budged since the 1970s.
If real income had tracked productivity during that time, we would have plenty. But it didn't. All the increases have been siphoned off to feed the ultra-wealthy, in a variety of ways.
All the increases have been siphoned off to feed the ultra-wealthy
No, the productivity gains are eaten up by expensive items with low perceived value. You don't think about the $1000 catalytic converter in your car, or $5,000 set of airbags. You just think you are paying more to do the exact same drive to work that you could have done in a $2,000 1970s car. And that's true! Nonetheless, there is real added cost and value to the car.
I don't think this is an example of the hedonic treadmill. People who believe that a new 2026 Tacoma is the hedonic equivalent of a new 1970 F-100 are simply wrong, in the same way that people who imagine taking all the flights they take today with the level of service provided on 1970s passenger planes are wrong. The extreme increase in reliability and build quality has shifted the dynamics of the car market, with essentially all new vehicle sales pushed upscale as budget-conscious buyers have no reason to buy new with even an infinite time horizon.
My $15k used car with 100k miles on it is just as reliable, just as stylish, and sparks just as much joy in me as the new cars my grandparents could have bought in 1970.
The 80s-and-on story of America is not a story of women and minorities getting on more solid economic footing at the cost of some additional costs for white male Americans. Almost everybody is worse off - higher debt, less property ownership among the youth, etc.
I wouldn't agree with a position of "white people aren't going to stop being racist, just separate everyone and let them be" (we could call this the Clarence Thomas position, as Corey Robin has written about[0]). But it's wildly misleading to say that the slippage of the American economy is because of less overt discrimination. It's universal. The economy itself is broken compared to how it used to be. (Personally, I'd point at the oligarch-fighting "soak the rich" taxes passed in the early 20th century as a key point here.)
Fire can't build a house.
The wheel can't grow crops.
Writing can't set a broken bone.
Double entry bookkeeping can't write a novel.
If you believe that this AI+robotics wave will be able to do anything a human can do with fewer complaints, what would the humans move on to?
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