2026-06-27 05:01:22
Some personal hot takes from AI: Engineer Miami follows...
1. Software development is a dead-end profession because anyone can be a software developer now.
2. Anyone can use Cursor or any other tool and generate code. Being a coder and being a software engineer are different.
3. Computers used to be gated; now everyone has the power to make computers malleable. Everyone is a software developer now, but that does not mean they are software engineers
4. If you cannot demonstrate how a coding agent works, you are just a consumer and have imposed an artificial glass ceiling on your career as a software engineer.
5. If you are curious, you will have a job. If you have not been curious in the last two years, you are replaceable.
6. SaaS per-seat economics may become unstable as customers need fewer people to achieve results, prompting founders to think about new unit economics
7. Most companies will take two or three years (or more!) to figure out AI transformation.
8. Some companies are already building AI native teams of five to ten people who can build with the grain of AI
9. There will be an explosion in the number of software developers. Software development is now essentially free, and tokens are cheaper than humans
10. Not enough engineers know what it means to be a product engineer
11. JIRA ticket monkeys are cooked
12. If your company has banned AI, you should quit that company
13. AI is more like a musical instrument than just a tool. Play with it, make discoveries, build intuition, learn where AI is good and where it fails
2026-05-18 12:33:19
2026-03-17 05:31:14
This is a follow-up from my previous post about AI as an economic weapon. If you haven't read it, I suggest that you do before proceeding.
I closed that post with the following, and we're going to expand on it:
The real question, however, is trust. I'm not saying that the Chinese models are dodgy. It's more of a meta question. You see, the question of trust extends to the frontier labs as well. As we enter this weird new space where businesses are being automated with AI, it essentially hands over your business's operations to another entity.
Another question on my mind is what happens to a country that lacks AI capabilities? When their businesses depend upon AI, and thus the country's economy depends upon AI, what happens if the spigot ever gets turned off through sanctions or war?
If we zoom forward a couple of years. It's now the future, and the future is undefined because no one really knows what it will look like, because it is the future, but if we play with the notion of extrapolating trends that are just starting right now, where founders, including myself, are building businesses with a mindset of autonomous software and product factories. We will soon be in a place where businesses are highly dependent upon the capabilities of AI, whether that be in access or how the models function.
This concerns me greatly, and it extends far beyond business and into society itself. You see, right now, society is already going through a Harry Potter-style sorting hat event where people are picking and choosing which tribe they belong to.
If you use any of the Frontier Lab models enough, you develop an eye for their tendencies, how they write, how they think, and how they communicate. If people are picking a single AI producer and using that AI daily in their day-to-day life to make decisions, they are outsourcing their cognitive security to someone else.
What concerns me is that, almost three or four years ago, Anthropic conducted research that allowed Frontier Labs to perform laparoscopic keyhole surgery to change how the models perform after they were made. This experiment was called Golden Gate Claude.
In this experiment, Anthropic performed surgery on the model's weight dimensions for the Golden Gate Bridge and no matter what you did when you were having a conversation with this model, the Golden Gate Bridge was always top of mind for the model.
For example, let's say that you wanted to go get some Panadol. It would give you driving instructions to a pharmacy via the Golden Gate Bridge. If you wanted to write a poem, that poem would prominently feature the Golden Gate Bridge.
Through modification of the model weights, the Golden Gate Bridge became a black hole where you could not escape from the gravity of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2024/scaling-monosemanticity/index.html
I'm surprised most people don't even know that this research exists and haven't really talked about or even written about what it could mean for society in the future.
Here's a scenario for you to chew on:
What happens when, in a couple of years, if a famous web search company, which was also a frontier AI lab, retires ads in their search product and instead offers their advertisers the ability to bid on the ability to rank higher in model weights than the competitors?
Most people would never know because they've outsourced their cognitive capability to a model.
What happens is if a famous social media network, which is also a Frontier lab, starts allowing their advertisers, to similarly bid to rank higher in the model weights, of their open source models that they're releasing for free.
Now, what happens if you extrapolate this? I don't know if this will actually happen. It's just baseless speculation, but one thing is for sure: we're entering into this world where a select few companies, these frontier labs, will have significant power over the world and how society functions, thinks and operates.
If these topics concern you, then perhaps the only true solution is that you should raise your own model, because by doing so, you gain the ability to protect your own cognitive security, business operations and supply chain.
2026-03-17 04:47:11
People often ask me how I feel about open-source models, and to be clear, I'm very supportive of them. But I can't help pondering about the following...
Open source always was and always will be a financial weapon by design. You see, one of the primary goals of open source was by releasing something as free, it removes the ability to make money from it.
Now, I'm not sure how old you are, dear reader, but if you wind the clock back far enough, you'll find traces in history that support this claim. Heck, you're probably even using Linux right now on a computer, in your house or at a server in a data centre. This was not always true. Back when this war was last raging, back in 1998, Windows was the server operating system of choice.
Linux was created to destroy Microsoft's ability to make money from Microsoft Windows. The same holds true for OpenOffice vs. Microsoft Office. It's now almost 20 years since the Halloween papers. If you're not familiar with the topic, I suggest you dig in and get up to speed with the subject matter.
In the last week of October 1998, a confidential Microsoft memorandum on Redmond's strategy against Linux and Open Source software was leaked to me by a source who shall remain nameless. I annotated this memorandum with explanation and commentary over Halloween Weekend and released it to the national press. Microsoft was forced to acknowledge its authenticity. The press rightly treated it as a major story and covered it (with varying degrees of cluefulness).
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents
Now you might be wondering why I'm writing about this. It's because local models are getting good. Heck, local models these days tend to be two to four months behind the leading-edge frontier labs.
Here's the thing, though: these local models are being released for free. You can just download them, or pay a minuscule fee (circa $5 USD/month) to access Frontier's open-source models from Alibaba or Z.AI.
Meanwhile, America is dumping literally trillions of dollars into research at these frontier labs. Now, I'm not calling AI a bubble because this absolutely is ROI. At this stage, I think it's impossible for anyone to say it is a bubble.
What I hope to do through this blog post is tweak some people's thinking beyond the bubble narrative. Perhaps what we're seeing is history repeating itself, but perhaps it's a little more sinister. Now, my background is not in geopolitics. I can't help but wonder if the US economy backs itself so hard into a corner funding these research labs, and if these research labs receive a bailout, what does that mean for China? Why is China releasing these models for free?
Perhaps what we're seeing here is all-out economic warfare between one nation-state and another through the weaponisation of open source because open source was, is, and always will be a financial weapon. In history, free was previously used against companies, but, if my speculation is on the mark, this is the first time it has been used at the national level by one nation against another.
I don't know what this means, and I'll leave the commentary, whether true or false, to someone with expertise in this arena but if you're aware that this is happening, then there are many ways where you can benefit from what is happening.
If you are a student or your financial budget does not allow for dropping $1,000 a month for subscriptions from all the major labs, then you can use these open-source models.
If you're a business, you should build with the mindset that local inferencing will be a thing. I suspect that in a not-so-distant future, we will have local models where society has full visibility into what goes into their training data sets, truly open-source models that are end-to-end reproducible, and I'm excited about these possibilities.
The real question, however, is trust. I'm not saying that the Chinese models are dodgy. It's more of a meta question. You see, the question of trust extends to the frontier labs as well. As we enter this weird new space where businesses are being automated with AI, it essentially hands over your business's operations to another entity.
Another question on my mind is what happens to a country that lacks AI capabilities? When their businesses depend upon AI, and thus the country's economy depends upon AI, what happens if the spigot ever gets turned off through sanctions or war?
2026-03-15 18:02:33
This one is short and sweet. if you want to port a codebase from one language to another here’s the approach:
The key theory here is usage of citations in the specifications which tease the file_read tool to study the original implementation during stage 3. Reducing stage 1 and stage 2 to specs is the precursor which transforms a code base into high level PRDs without coupling the implementation from the source language.
2026-03-13 02:55:07
Below you'll find an AI transcription of everything we riffed about.
Key distinction: Software Development vs. Software Engineering:
Future: hyper-personalized software; old models of building/scaling via scarcity are disrupted.
ps. this interview is also available: