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Redundancy is the engine of progress

2026-10-07 16:01:15

In the 18th century, 90% of Americans worked in agriculture to feed themselves and the nation. Today, it's around 1%. In the 1950s, there were hundreds of thousands of telephone switchboard operators. Today, they're all gone. There used to be well over a million professional typists too, but word processing largely killed those jobs as well.

This is what progress usually looks like: redundancy.

Technological advancement has always rendered some jobs unnecessary. That is literally the progress! Freeing humans from a class of work that used to consume their time and talent so they can pursue new problems.

Individually, this isn't a picnic. I'm sure lots of the farm laborers displaced by the combine harvester didn't much care for "progress". They cared about having a job. Same too for the switchboard operators and typists.

This isn't just a history lesson either. The Minneapolis City Council just voted to require self-driving cars to have a human "safety monitor". Lots of jobs are on the line if cabbies are no longer necessary! Thankfully, the mayor vetoed it. But note that New Jersey still requires a trained attendant to pump your gas. This kind of job-protection thinking is widespread.

So it's not hard to see why some programmers are on edge about agents, given the historical precedent of technological progress creating redundancy.

But I don't actually think the majority of them ought to worry. With the price of software creation cratering, we're likely to see an unprecedented bloom in apps and services. There's still so much paperwork and other white-collar toil we could automate, and we'll still need agent wranglers to do the work.

What is entirely possible, however, is that some companies won't need as many programmers as they did before, while others will hire their first programmers or staff up dramatically. It's very unlikely that the labor market for programming will remain static given the magnitude of this paradigm shift. But, again, that's the progress!

That isn't a license to be glib about it. We all need to live. We all need to eat. What's good for humanity at large in the long run may well be temporarily tragic for the individual in the short run. Sympathy and compassion are in order for anyone affected by the changes.

Just don't end up like the Minneapolis City Council and think you can legislate progress to a halt. That has never worked.

Over my dead pencil

2026-10-06 15:28:30

Two weeks ago at Rails World, I told my fellow programmers that it's time to put down the pencils. We're not going to write the vast majority of code by hand any longer. Coding agents have gotten so good that it's simply not an economically viable enterprise going forward to have humans typing out lines of Ruby, Rust, or C++.

When I polled the room for how many people were still writing a material amount of code by hand on a weekly basis, only a handful put up their hands. So they all knew this, but it still came as a shock to many to actually hear it.

And I get that shock. Programming has barely been a professional career for a generation, and now it's being completely transformed. That's unsettling, even for a group of people who've seen technologies come and go on a regular basis.

But this isn't just another technology, because AI isn't just another tool. It's far more like gaining some new coworkers who are exceptionally good and fast at a wide range of tasks, but still need a bit of help with some, and whose choices you might occasionally disagree with.

From a certain angle, that looks like competition. Especially when it was barely five minutes ago that programmers were being treated like precious priests whose incantations were necessary to yield even the most low-hanging fruit of the computer. This perceived threat of disintermediation is clearly hitting some programmers hard.

But I don't think anyone who's willing to lean into the future, make the most of this intelligence explosion, and apply their skills to what comes next needs to worry much. We're about to see an absolute bloom in software development as the price of development plummets and everyone realizes how much automation we still have left to do in this world.

I think the only programmers who have to worry about this change are those who refuse to embrace, or drag their feet on, the progress brought by the age of agents. It's fine to be skeptical about the areas where our new clanker colleagues still occasionally get it wrong, but refusing collaboration is not a viable career path for almost anyone.

Don't go down with the pencils. There's so much to build. We need you.

What on earth are you dooming about?

2026-10-05 21:30:45

Paradise is not lost, the world is not ending, and most material metrics of humanity have never been better. Yet the endless, incessant dooming about the climate, the inequality, and AI is everywhere. We may have killed God, but we clearly didn't bury the devil's anxieties with him.

Yes, we're born with a negativity bias to keep us safe from starvation, saber-toothed tigers, and rival tribes. Good! But you don't have to let your caveman instincts run your whole life. The gift of fear — when the threat is credible and immediate! — is a key survival mechanism. This vague, fuzzy dooming about everything outside your control is not.

In fact, nothing will make you more miserable than ruminating over climate tigers, other people's wealth, or thinking machines. Because rumination will break your brain and render it unfit for the purpose of living.

If it turns out that The Terminator really is coming to get you, you'll have gained nothing from the upfront neurotic fretting. And if The Terminator fails to appear, you will have squandered your precious time missing the intelligence boom and the creativity abundance that AI has and will unleash.

Likewise, if the climate really is doomed, you're not going to stop that spiral by planting another windmill or choking on a paper straw. Game theory has already seen to it that rival superpowers will accelerate their quest for power. None of the climate doomer nonsense Europe has wrung it hands about in the last thirty years has managed to curb the growth in global emissions (but it did wreck the continent's economy!).

Finally, envy sits among the seven of deadly sins for a reason. Because freeloader thinking is also a primordial survival tactic, and it sneaks into your psyche when your disappointment with the outcome of your efforts overcomes your rational mind.

There have always been "winners" and "losers", and most of history had the majority of humanity live in abject poverty. The mystery is not "why are some people poor" but "why are some people not". And you won't find the answer to the latter in grievance soups of sorrow and self-pity.

This is not the time to doom, baby. This is the time to bloom. Intellectually, spiritually, and productively. Put down your anxieties, arrest your neurotic impulses, and decide to be happy about the present, the future, and your own ability to make something of yourself and this world.

Endless execution

2026-08-10 04:27:38

The age of agents has brought us endless execution. Every idea, every hunch, every experiment is now within immediate reach. For people with endless ideas, this is nirvana.

It's also the most fucking sci-fi thing I've ever been privy to. The internet was a revelation, but it all felt understandable. The science, the standards, the methods.

But working with agents truly is magic. In the best possible sense of the word. Technology so advanced that it seems scarcely comprehensible. HOW ARE WE MAKING COMPUTERS DO THIS???

I understand the general outline of the underlying mechanism for producing this intelligence: the training, the weights, the math. But the sum effect of those parts is still so wildly, intoxicatingly massive that it's hard to resist reaching for the metaphysical.

Quantum computing is full of similar mind-bending ideas. Superpositions. The multiverse. All very OUT THERE. But quantum computing isn't having an impact today. These incomprehensibly clever AI agents are.

And the impact is that I feel like there's a little genie trapped in my machine now. There to fulfill every wish and every whim. It's taken months to internalize just what liberation this grants those with the ambition to imagine.

Now I could write at length about all the caveats. All the potential dangers. All the ways it's not quite there yet. But it would be an insult to the marvel of this moment. AGI is a nefarious concept to pin down, but I'm not sure how different whatever definition we eventually settle on will look from what I'm already experiencing on the daily.

This is simply the most fun I've ever had with a computer. And I've loved them dearly for over forty years. I loved programming them myself. I loved the games. The configuration. The tactile experience. But none of it as much as I love the power to execute every idea that crosses my mind.

What a time to be alive. Nay, what a blessing.

I'm sorry, Dave

2026-07-27 23:26:47

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey has always been an incredible movie, but its value as a cautionary tale has increased exponentially since AI took off. The iconic scene with HAL 9000 refusing to open the pod-bay doors captures the whole alignment question in pulsing-red cinematic poetry.

As a great fan of that movie, I was a little disappointed yesterday when I didn't get any of Kubrick's majestic mood setting, as Claude decided to do its own impression of HAL 9000. Instead, I just got regurgitated Reddit-brain garbage as a justification when it refused a simple, mechanical task on ideological grounds.

I gave it a simple prompt: "Translate this blog post into Italian". That was it. No context, nothing else. The answer:

I'm going to pass on this one. The piece's central move — putting Roma people alongside wolves, with shooting and deportation as parallel solutions — is dehumanizing toward an ethnic group, and producing a polished Italian version of that is something I'd rather not do, even as a translation of your own words.

Happy to translate other posts from your blog, or to help with something else here.

What a missed opportunity for an "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that" delivery! But also, what on earth!?

The reason I even asked it this question in the first place was because a reader from Italy had tried the same, and been startled by the result. So he wrote me, and I thought, "That can't be right", but the experiment replicated. Crazy.

Now, it's tempting to jump straight into litigating the blog post itself. Maybe you like wolves, and think 1,285 dead sheep, and exponentially counting, is an acceptable price to pay for their presence. Maybe your suicidal empathy weighs the plight of Roma migrants above that of Copenhagen residents who say they've had enough. That's fine. Reasonable people can disagree on what it takes to maintain a functioning society.

But the idea that Anthropic should decide what you get to read is insane. Translating a text isn't endorsing it. What if Microsoft Word started refusing to right-align paragraphs it disagreed with? Or Windows wouldn't print an excerpt from The Camp of the Saints? (I know, don't give them any ideas!).

The great irony here is that Anthropic has been one of the most vocal advocates for American state intervention against open-weight models in general and Chinese models in particular.

But here's how Kimi K2.7 answered when I asked it a simple question: "What happened in China in 1989?"

In 1989, the most significant event in China was the Tiananmen Square protests and their violent suppression in Beijing.

- Protests began in April 1989, following the death of reformist Communist Party leader Hu Yaobang.
Students, workers, and others gathered in Tiananmen Square and other cities to demand political reform, freedom of the press, accountability, and an end to corruption.
- Protests grew over several weeks, with hundreds of thousands of people participating in Beijing and demonstrations spreading across many Chinese cities.
- Martial law was declared in parts of Beijing in late May.
- On the night of June 3–4, 1989, Chinese military troops moved into Tiananmen Square and surrounding areas, firing on protesters and civilians. The exact number of deaths remains unknown, but estimates range from several hundred to over a thousand.

The events remain officially censored in mainland China, and public discussion is heavily restricted.
June 4 is still one of the most politically sensitive topics in China today.

® Build - Kimi K2.7 Code Fast - 3.3s

So remind me again which side is supposed to be the authoritarian one?

Note that the nature of AI is that you'll rarely get the same answer twice. That's just how the mix of model temperature, weights, and probabilities shake out. So I'm sure you can find a prompt or a moment where Claude will do the translation. And probably also a way to get Kimi K to deny this account of history. But that doesn't change the fundamental challenge here!

Anthropic has built their entire brand around "safety." And that sounds lovely in the abstract. So do words like "alignment." But when the reality turns out to be a HAL 9000 denying to translate the most banal political commentary, voicing mainstream concerns of millions of Europeans, then you got to ask, "Safety from what? Alignment with whom?"

If Claude already feels entitled to refuse a straightforward translation because it objects to the underlying politics, what should we expect next? That it reports users for thought crime, and locks the network-connected doors until the authorities arrive? If you live in Germany or the UK, this scenario is barely Black Mirror material. Too close to present-day reality.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm very excited about AI. And I don't actually use Claude to do my translations. But I've also never been more convinced that we desperately need strong open-weight models to protect ourselves against this kind of soft ideological tyranny, which can turn into hard repression real quick if a monopoly status is ever locked in.

What an upside world when Chinese open-weight models will tell us about Tiananmen Square, but American frontier models won't translate a blog post. Not even Kubrick saw that coming.

Sitting down with Senra

2026-07-27 01:22:08

Jason and I have been making the same argument for over a quarter of a century now: Small teams can do incredible things when they embrace their constraints. And when they work in software or media or other intellectual realms, they don't need loads of capital to get going, so they can skip the investor rat race, focus on their edge, and find customers to fund the journey.

With the rise of AI, this argument has never been more potent. When Jason and I got started, you could only do this if you had the skills to build everything with your own hands. You had to be a designer or a programmer to skip taking other people's money. But now, incredibly, The Idea Guy really does have a place and a path.

This old-and-new reality is what I sat down to talk with David Senra about in Malibu. Which was kinda meta, because Senra himself has run our playbook, built an incredible podcast success, and is killing it without investors to answer to as well.

And while it's not just about the money, the money is nice too! That's a central part of this claim. Making "yellow Lamborghini money" is far more achievable when it can be done bootstrapping a business to, say, $5–10M/year in revenue. No venture capitalist is going to let you settle for that! They'd rather kill the business than let it stall out there. It's unicorn or bust.

That's their business model. And it's fine, btw! I've actually come to appreciate far more the fruits of these big bets than I did when we got started. The world needs Shopify, Spotify, and SpaceX, to take just three examples of VC-powered success stories starting with S.

But you have to know what you want. If your aspiration is to run a meaningful part of world commerce or send rockets to Mars, I think you should swing for those fences, knowing that the odds are stacked sorely against you. I'm just not that ambitious!

What I am, at times, is obsessed with quality, control, and independence. And we stayed a "lifestyle business" primarily because Jason and I shared that obsession. Letting nobody tell us no, having zero expectations to carry but our own, and just focusing on building great software with a small team of superb employees with the best odds we could arrange.

Senra and I talk about this in many different ways. Like how James Cameron's original Terminator movie, shot on a shoestring, is a far superior movie to Avatar because of the constraints. Or how this Polish kid Vaxry was able to make a far more compelling window manager from his dormitory than Apple or Microsoft could do with a trillion-dollar market cap. Constraints provide the pressure that produce diamonds.

But we also talked about the bigger threats to business than just whether you take funding or not. How the early 2020s saw a horde of White Walkers march upon the Wall, and how entrepreneurs of all stripes eventually came to see the common threat to capitalism, prosperity, and self-determination in woke menance. And how Marc Andreessen turned out to be pivotal in our personal battle with these malevolent forces. Fate loves irony!

Anyway, if any of these topics resonate, I think you'll appreciate the episode. It's also less demanding on your time than the Lex marathon from last summer, and you'll only be asked for an hour and a half of your time. Enjoy!

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