The big change I've seen is that before if you knew what you were doing you had two options:

- Make something crappy fairly quickly

- Make something good a little slower

AI has introduced a third option:

- Make something really crappy at light speed

A lot of companies are very excited about this and it makes it hard to advocate for "make something good a little slower" (even though AI can help speed that up.)

It feels like a race to the bottom. Companies were already prioritizing speed over quality. With AI a lot of them are doubling down.

Except that AI also allows people to make something half-decent at light speed.

Yes, the average vibe coded app might not scale to millions of users, might not be perfectly secure, etc. but let's be honest: the freelance web developer you would have paid $25,000 to build your app a decade ago was in most cases not going to deliver a highly-scalable, highly-secure product either.

AI can allow companies to prioritize speed over quality, but it has also enabled lots of small businesses and entrepreneurs to actually build things that they wouldn't have if they had to pay a developer $xxx/hour.

Yeah that’s fair

It still makes it a tougher sell to deliver high quality more slowly

Side note: when it comes to front end I’m thinking less about scalability and security (though they apply) and more about performance, accessibility, reaponsiveness, quality UI, maintainability, basic design sense, etc.

Honestly if we went back to horses but had good public transportation as well (buses, trains, airports) it could be pretty sweet

I know most people don’t agree with that but it seems nice to me

Thanks for sharing. Well worth the read. They’re a good writer

Thank you both! The comments in this corner of the thread made my day.

Do you know people who have gotten 10x raises due to increased output since AI came out? The one group I can think of is workers at AI companies but that seems more like a gold rush situation than anything

AI companies have reaped the most benefit out of AI, so naturally most 10xers come from people who have equity in those companies that grow really fast

I don't think the average person has even close to a 10x output increase due to AI.

Exactly. All the employers are still sharing the same sized market. There’s not more money going around for them to earn.

But they’re also paying hefty AI bills so there’s less money for salaries.

The AI companies just swoop in and take some of the money that was going to the working man

Right, the AI companies don’t even try to pretend it’s good for the average person.

The message could be “we’ll all do more by working less.” Instead it’s, “some people will lose their jobs while everyone else works the same amount or more”

What's crazy is the glee when saying that. It's like "fuck those uppity low class people who managed to move up socially thanks to an in-demand job requiring some skill". Now we're back to only who you know, skills are for the AI.

We expect that because the company is only allowed to exist at the will of society at large.

A social system that looks at a technology like LLMs and decides to use it to increase "output" in some abstract way while reducing the median standard of living is a system that will have a hard time maintaining popular (non-elite) legitimacy. That doesn't mean it will evaporate over night -- plenty of ghastly social systems have survived centuries with very little non-elite legitimacy.

It remains to be seen if LLMs will be used in this way, but the messaging so far (including your post, the one I'm replying to) suggests that the elites' inclination is exactly that: more profit, more control, more power now for elites, temporary (possibly years, maybe as long a generation or three) but real suffering for many of the rest, and a steady state at the end of the transition where they are still in charge, much richer, and maybe also everyone else is better off (if they can't capture the gains completely for themselves).

Pretty embarrassing UI mistake for as major a launch as a redesign of Google Search

Lots of illustrator jobs for businesses too

Things aren’t terrible therefore they’re perfect

Yea what are they trying to test? Where is the hypothesis?

We're generally trying to test if/when AIs can run companies. Not many people know this, but Vending-Bench (our other project where AIs run vending machines) is intended as a datapoint for measuring whether AIs can acquire resources by themselves, which is a prerequisite to AIs taking over. This is similar, but now instead of a retail business, it's a media business.

They're trying to test if it's good enough to replaced the few remaining paid radio/streaming DJs yet.