Yes. Here's one relevant quote that touches on autonomization and secession:
> Most simply, there is the utilitarian order, in which capital establishes itself as the competitively-superior solution to prior purposes (production of human use-values), and the intelligenic order in which it accomplishes its self-escalation (mechanization, autonomization, and ultimately secession).
Nick Land (2014). Freedoom (Prelude-1a) in Xenosystems Blog. Retrieved from github.com/cyborg-nomade/reignition
> Maybe we were already oversupplied with talent. In which case why the heck were we still hiring more, more, more developers? Before the AI craze, Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out?
I don't think it's a matter of oversupply, it's a matter of allocation of resources. Are there more developers than what there would need to be in a hypothetically optimal allocation of headcount? Yes
Say you have X billions of dollars to spend on headcount. How do you determine where to put people such that the money is allocated efficiently and people are working on the right things? How do you make sure that the money gets used efficiently? It's in the billions, you don't have time to do this. So you have to delegate, which leads to managers gaming the system.
In smaller companies, it's easier to determine this because things are still simple enough for the top-level leadership to have some idea.
As the company gets bigger, more bad actors enter, there is more fabrication and empire building trying to frame where the headcount is "needed". Bigger companies handle this differently. Maybe they just get slower and pay less. Or maybe they do more layoffs. Moving people around internally is too complicated for the VPs, it's easier to just cut and hire later.
Why does software have this problem specifically? Idk, maybe it occurs in other places. But at least in the case of software, the systems become very specialized and it's hard to really figure out what matters and what doesn't
Musk cutting the headcount and everything working fine is a myth he perpetrated. In reality things started to go badly almost immediately, big advertisers left.
He then wrapped x in xAI where effectively they are developing new features in x. So that now we effectively don’t really know what the head count is.
This corporate messaging of "just use AI, cut as many corners as possible, only retain the essential people and force them to sling slop 7 days a week" is unsustainable.
It's wrong for so many reasons. It disrupts talent pipelines. The staff+ people probably don't want to work twice as hard to cover the cut headcount. In general, people prefer to work on systems that are well architected and not some slop that got vibe coded up in a weekend.
They (corporate upper management) could've just done nothing and the end result would've been better than whatever the fuck is happening right now
> management clearly have no idea how to tell which people are actually working
they probably do, it's just a matter of incentives, i.e. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"
maybe companies try to fix this with PIP quotas or something, but then this gets taken and perverted by the managers to where it has the opposite purpose and the highest rating goes to whoever helps build the empire the fastest
I think it increases the amount of enjoyment, there's less semantic language specific stuff to deal with and you can spend more time on the core task.
I think from my perspective at least, claude code / codex + improved information retrieval capabilities is good enough. The rest of the handwavey billionaire bullshit is just noise to me. I think it's wrong to sour on the technology, better to sour on the rich assholes who want to taint it with their personal agenda
I don't think it's purposeful from a company leadership perspective.
Imo what I've seen happen is it's just empire building. Say you're a billionaire CEO and you have a bunch of money to spend on accomplishing some business goal. To deploy that much money, you need layers of management. Every time you introduce a new layer, that layer will have its own incentives and spin off its own narratives to benefit themselves while simultaneously giving the opposite impression to leadership.
This is probably just a natural byproduct of sufficiently large organizations. The same way the middle layers of the network stack tend to consolidate (e.g. TCP), there's some invisible hand of incentives which makes this inevitable
I think the point is to push people out primarily.
This gives them a narrative for doing that by asking for something which isn't doable. Then middle management applies the expectation unevenly to people below them based off of political favor.
I feel the exact same way, it helps speed up development a lot (and eliminates a lot of really annoying grunt work). But I see people I work with doing shit with it that doesn't make any sense, e.g. writing 50k lines of code for a "compiler" when it's really just an interpreter under the hood. Like they never take the time to understand the domain more deeply, they just use claude to sling some shit that barely works
> i'm not sure what gap people are trying to close building themselves some proverbial great library here, but i would encourage people to just sit back and trust that their brain is still one of the greatest technologies at their disposal.
Culturally I think this is going to fuck things up significantly. If I take the time to read all of the latest papers in the LLM space, I'm damn well not going to summarize it or document what I've learned for anyone. (Maybe this is why there are not many high quality books aggregating all of this information in all the latest papers, all of the advancements, etc. All the people doing this work would rather (smartly) milk the cash cow and maintain the information asymmetry.)
Or think about open source, this will kill it for people trying to make money off a product and keep it open source. Because someone could spin up a competitor overnight.
AI is going to make the information easier to acquire for cheap. But it's going to absolutely destroy the incentive structure and trust required to have an open exchange of information. It was already bad enough because the industry is not incentivized to produce quality literature for educational purposes like academia is. But after this, it'll be a complete shit show
In a just world, an AI consuming Open Source material for training would itself become Open Source, as any other piece of software. There's an ongoing violation of the social contract of people doing things collaboratively, and it is going to massively bite us all in the ass.
you can use AI to get a faster explanation for what's happening in a big codebase, it makes the timelines on developing features much lower from my experience
am I losing out on something by not having to spend hours clicking through redundant parts of a large codebase to get a concrete answer on something? doesn't feel like it
> when ambiguous, assume intent is malicious, ignorant, or amoral.
If you're in a toxic environment, this is what it's like. It's a culture problem, not an individual problem.
Here are some examples, going to get anecdotal here:
- People stealing credit for my work
- Needing to kick them off of projects I'm on to protect myself
- Getting into political standoffs with people trying to pressure and threaten me into arrangements that fuck me over
- Had people I work with turn on me all of a sudden and try to throw me under the bus
- A manager forcing someone to work with shitty consultants (who were, of course, a personal connection), then using it to throw them under the bus
- People trying to gatekeep higher ROI work for favorites
- Management lying to people and misrepresenting opportunities to get them to join, then rug pulling once they've signed on the dotted line
The "antisocial" behaviors in the post are just the sort of rational emotional detachment which happens when you figure out that you're dealing with shitty people.
Maybe I'll get genuinely antisocial here: a lot of people in general are shitty people. Or at least, if you've attracted shitty people into your life in the past, it'll keep happening in the future and you're better off growing the emotional scar tissue (i.e. "avoidant attachment") instead of this victim blaming. There's something about you that makes them target you and you're better off having the artillery ready
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