Practical quality beats theoretical quality every time. In theory, a human engineer with infinite time and focus might produce better code than an AI agent. In practice, humans lose context over days, have decaying attention spans on hard-but-tedious problems, and skip benchmarks they know they should run. AI agents maintain consistent focus, run every test, and can work on problems continuously for days or weeks.
Inside the companies pulling ahead — Anthropic, Cursor, Cognition, Replit, and a small number of others — a different unit shape had emerged: five-to-ten people, direct CEO reporting, broad decision rights, hybrid roles, communication overhead at roughly one-tenth of a comparably-staffed conventional product unit.
There's a reality here that you simply do not stay up to date on what everyone is doing. You'll spend all your energy keeping tabs instead of doing the work you actually should be doing.
The reason is obvious when you think about it: enterprises are paying for their employees' time, so of course they are willing to pay for tools that make those employees more productive; consumers, on the other hand, are mostly looking to waste time, which is why attention-harvesting advertising is the only software business model that works at scale for consumer services.
For companies using advanced AI coding tools, only 18% of spending on tokens is translating into shipped coding products that reach real users, according to EntelligenceAI, a startup that aggregated data on more than 2,000 companies using advanced AI tools for coding. Jellyfish, a company that tracks AI usage, found rapidly diminishing returns in terms of converting tokens to actual software.
2w ago
It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?
Goals transform AI from a turn-based assistant that needs constant 'what's next?' prompting into an autonomous agent that can work for hours on complex, multi-step tasks.
I don't think we're going to call them engineers. But if we talk about people writing code, or using agents to write code, I think there will be 100 times more engineers than there are today. That's my prediction.
I've always thought it's so cool that the smartest person in the world on a topic I care about spends 2+ years of their life distilling their best ideas into an enjoyable read, and I can get this for just $20.
I realized I could either continue to drain myself for a small expense, or let it go and focus on the projects in front of me. I had, unknowingly, engaged in maladaptive frugality.
His marketing team built a fully functional e-commerce swag store with Stripe integration in days. His sales team built their own CRM tools. His recruiting team automated their entire workflow. And it's all tracked, measured, and celebrated through an internal platform called Automators.
The real value unlocks when you have genuinely hard technical problems. The "I trust you, figure it out" prompt unlocks autonomous multi-hour workflows.
So much money and attention is focused on re-thinking our work tools and processes today, Gavini notes, with many of tech's smartest people bringing AI to verticals like legal or healthcare. "My workflow changes every three months now," he says. "So why are the apps that I use on my phone every day still the same?"
Those early adopters found, to their surprise, not only that the models were good at puzzles, but that they could help break genuinely new ground. Soon, mathematicians were using AI to discover and prove new results, accomplishing in a day what would have once taken them weeks or months.
No one would deny the fact that he who knows and acts is the one who counts, not he who knows and falls asleep. We render a tribute of respect to those who add original work to a library, and withhold it from those who carry a library around in their head.
2mo ago
Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished. The apparent leisureliness of natural processes conceals an efficiency that frantic human activity can never match.
The more I play with OpenClaw, the more convinced I am that it is one of the most powerful AI tools for personal use, and a sign of where these tools are going.
This Generative AI momentum is creating a lot of optimism around the potential of one person companies or solopreneurs using agentic AI. If Agentic AI works out, small businesses might have a new array of powerful tools as well.
Until now, working with AI has been copy-paste. You take information from one app, paste it into ChatGPT or Claude, get a result, then manually move that result into another app. You're the middleman between AI and the tools you use in your work. Plugins remove you from that role.
Being in familiar surroundings with adequate control over my time and space is a necessary condition for immersing myself fully in reading, writing, and taking pictures—activities that nourish me and give me space for creativity.
The deeper problem appears to be that the tech is not a meaningful job creator or increasing productivity outside of a few roles even in technology companies.
3mo ago
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
3mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
