It didn’t used to be. Back in the mid 2000s I basically designed our company’s tech interview process based on a few articles he’d written about how he was doing the same at Amazon. He was a must follow for me back in the salad days of RSS. When I saw the Gastown announcement I had trouble reconciling the author and the writing.

And even still, it’s hard to ignore him because he’ll still have some insight like “token efficiency is going to be the big thing we care about in the future,” which was a small section of one of his Gastown blogs. And after you’re done asking yourself if that means Gastown is performance art, or he just said that as a hedge against his “vomit tokens” approach so that he could say “look I knew it all along” when this is all proven to be misguided, you’ll start to mull on just the concept of “token efficiency” and realize “someone who can do work in 1/10th the tokens will be king.” I mean hell, Gastown preceded real support for multiagent orchestration in Claude and potentially nudged it along that path.

Yeah, it's just depressing because one of the links in here took me to his Twitter (my mistake) and I was just like, "Oh, got it, life event (maybe a divorce, maybe just aging) turned you toxic and now you're lost in the wilderness. +/- 6 months until he is claiming ketamine solved/ broke him.

(It's nice to have the superpower to judge people on social media posts, I know. It's a gift, I try not to use it for evil.)

It certainly is now, but it's also seemingly all written by LLMs now, as well. He wasn't always like this, though he has always been prone to exaggeration and simplification. He had a lot of solid insights, though, and I enjoyed reading him. Things change.