Flintstone Engineering is applying Space Age synthetic intelligence (in a metaphorical sense) technology with code generation. Babysitting, version controlling, etc. generated code should be a thing of the past. But that is what GenAI is.
At the very least apply it at a higher level: specification, proofs, anything but generating Rust/Java/C and then letting yourself or an agent babysit it.
> A few days back I wrote a piece called “AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy.”
Guess who the author is.
> > The enthusiasts are not wrong. We are starting to see real, non-imaginary, discontinuous leaps in capabilities from teams that lean in hard to working with AI. And this does not feel like a normal technology cycle where you can wait for the dust to settle; teams that sit this out while competitors are hustling could be out of business before the dust settles. That’s a real, existential threat.
It’s not imaginary. It’s real. This time it’s different. And on a higher level, the FOMO is real. It’s not imaginary. It’s even existential.
Why do they all write the same as well? It’s so emphatic.
> The tech is cool, but as a thinking, feeling, breathing human who cares about other people, it can be hard to get excited about anything that so many people are this upset about. It’s also hard to get excited about something when so many of the loudest voices are out there talking gleefully about putting everyone permanently out of work, and so many artists and writers and people from developing nations are talking openly about the impact on them.
> Hold your desire to jump in and berate me here, I beg you. Like I said, I will deal with the ethics and morality of using AI in my very next post. Be honest, your attention span is no more up for reading a 10,000-word essay than mine is up for writing one. (Can we blame AI for that too?)
More Inevitability Soothsaying. All our feelings are crashing with Existentinal Threat Reality.
Why such a strong reaction? Do you think good leaders exist?
I have received multiple emails from alumni thanking me for my leadership, mentorship, and the culture I created. Leading is a skill like any other it can be improved with practice and I have worked hard at it.
My team has no problem disagreeing with me and knows I don’t want sycophantic agreement, they know that even if I ultimately make a decision I will consider all opinions and have seen me change my mind in response to a direct report disagreeing with me in public.
There are known mechanisms to foster a safe and effective environment like that such as separating people from ideas, removing consequences for failure and commitment to experimentation.
Why reach for a gun? You want to kill people that proclaim to be better leaders because of a self-help book? I know people drew guns for less but this is the first time I am reading something like this on HN.
I’d suggest you’d read a few books so that you don’t have to reach for your gun but can use your words instead. Though the moment you’d claim any of those books helped you will be a bit of an ironic moment but so be it.
I recommend Non-violent Communication by Rosenberg for you. It got me out of a few pickles (arguments). Also going to a meditation retreat helps.
You shouldn't laugh off the recommendation. That is a good book. I haven't read it personally but it affected my life deeply.
My wife and I both grew up in physically violent homes. My mom read that book and taught me and my siblings the lessons along with others. And my children have only ever experienced shouting or physical violence when they went to their grandparents house.
I understand you were using that phrase as hyperbole and did really mean it but there is a lot of evidence that the language we use shapes our prefrontal cortex and limbic system responses in every moment. By using that phrase you're subtlety sending your body and brain and anyone that read that into an anxious fight or flight response. That shuts down the ability to listen, persuade or connect. It triggers defensiveness, avoidance etc.
So even though you have a valid point lot of bad leaders exist, and often claim loudly to be good leaders with no self awareness of their actual weaknesses. Its hard to listen when a rhetorical gun has been drawn.
It's reasonable to at least expect that. It's their job after all, while for any single voter there is a lower standard you can realistically hold them too and less time available to verify/debunk claims.
On top of that, there are also instruments that help the voters track whether politicians are engaging in corrupt lobbyism like voting records + donation / campaign contribution records, though few countries do that to a degree that it forms a cohesive anti-corruption framework. None of those measures exist for individual voters.
Well, your local coucilor probably doesn't have access to it, but MPs definitely have access to aides and experts they can ask for opinion and summary before they go in front of a camera and make a fool out of themselves for saying something based on a snippet they saw on TikTok. They are literally surrounded by people whose entire job is to be well informed.
> On top of that, there are also instruments that help the voters track whether politicians are engaging in corrupt lobbyism like voting records + donation / campaign contribution records, though few countries do that to a degree that it forms a cohesive anti-corruption framework. None of those measures exist for individual voters.
Corruption by definition is intentional, compare getting hoodwinked by "misinformation". Curious what "measures [] for individual voters" even means with regards to voters. A voter cannot be corrupt since they only represent themselves.
There’s interestingly all this hoopla and indirection, tracking corruption and misaligned priorities, even now adding the burden to the feeble voter mind to not only stay clear of misinformation campaigns but to watch out for corruption in their own representatives. This seems ripe for simplification.
That more democracy is more attackable is not a coherent position. More democracy means more people power. But people being powerless to resist misinformation campaigns means that they do not have power. Which means that it is not really democracy. This is the same as saying that democracy is being undermined by wealth inequality. If money can buy political power and money is unevenly distributed then it’s not a democracy.
If one was actually interested in actual democracy one would fix that misinformation asymmetry.
If only we all could rise to the level of not doing stupid things on company property (praise), or company time (praise), then we would want for no privacy for there was never any to be taken in the first place.
Okay, this is America so fair enough. We can’t reasonably generalize in this context.
Jesus Christ. Here is how AI relates to me—ooh, with suspense-driving one-sentence paragraphs and reflective commandments. Come on, in Q2 2026 this is still a thing?
The self-involved industry is in shambles.
> What’s actually going on?
Need the meander headlines. I told you what is going on. Now. Let me interpret what I just wrote for you.
It would be just boring if self-help books were down because people believe less in astrology and affirmations or something. Couldn’t write about the Zeitgeist that way.
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I’m not just a cynic. I lived a former life as well. And self-help is something ranging from entertainment to fantasy to small chance of personal transformation. And for books, it’s a cheap hobby compared to one-on-one pscyhology. So would it make sense to replace that with a language soup? Not really. The idiosyncracy is the whole point, jesus.
People might get taken in by it. That doesn’t mean that it will work in the long run.
I would just like to lightly push back on that point. That bad code? That dead end? That month’s worth of tokens spent on a runaway loop? Those weren’t dead ends. Those were learning points. Experiences carried forward, etched in your mind. So take heart. We need both successes and failures to grow as people. And you are growing. I can see it.
Speaking of things that I don’t buy. Metaphorically yesterday this site would gatekeep over enjoying the process of coding itself. People who merely programmed for a 200KUSD paycheck, pphew, disgusting.
Made a post about how you learned to touch type? Or improved something keyboard-related? “I don’t think that typing code was ever the bottlenck”.[1] Now we’re supposed to be grateful for non-deterministic code completion, ah it saves us millions of keystrokes a year.
Some will cry Goomba Fallacy. Yeah of course. Could be that many lurker accounts started posting more, displacing the gatekeeper typist hackers. Now it’s all of a sudden an even split. Huh.
The OP was not about AI. But thankfully there was a top-level meta comment to drag us down into that pit.
[1] The non sequitur of it all is a separate topic
> Over the past month I’ve received three letters in a row from strangers — all software engineers I’ve never met. One was a frontend developer in infrastructure, another did data ops, the third was somewhere in between. The three letters look different, but they ask the same question.
Moments where I wonder why this is an apparent people sent me thoughts opinion column while at the same time not caring.
> These three questions are, fundamentally, the same question. On the surface it looks like an engineering question, or a career planning question, but underneath it is an existential question: once execution is fully taken over by machines, where does the human stand? Or more bluntly — once AI takes everything it can take, what is left for us?
As we will see later, the answers are just hustlerism.
But that’s very immediate and practical. So why this existential pose?
Because the societal questions have very immediate questions and answers as well if you don’t actively try to obfuscate with philosophical nonsense.
- Who benefits?
- Who will be left standing?
And the answers to those aren’t the machines, unless you’re some ideological cretin who believes in AI takeover while at the same time is working on building AI. They are also people.
And if your doomer narrative has labor of all sort vanishing, and it’s just a matter of time, interspersed with model gooning—who are the h-u-m-a-ns left?
Why hustler on the individual level, philosopher on the societal level?
> Later, some of them went out at night and smashed the machines. History calls them the Luddites. People usually treat them as fools who hated technology, but that’s a misreading—
No, it’s an intentional reading. But we’re too busy obfuscating to face obvious facts.
> So the real question is not “do you know how to use AI.” People who know how to use it today do hold an advantage over those who don’t, but the half-life of that advantage is maybe a year or two — and at the top of the field, possibly only one or two months. The pressure from each new model generation is mounting; the window for exploration and adaptation gets shorter every time. Every new model release brings another paradigm shift, and the workflow you painstakingly built, the prompting tricks you collected, the engineering scaffolding you accumulated — any of it can become a Spinning Jenny overnight
So what does this afford you in terms of amazing insight?
> My only method for dealing with this is what I call end-state thinking: don’t spend yourself on intermediate-state problems. Think and act with the endpoint as the premise.
Platitude nonsense.
Don’t look at the trees. Look at the whole forest.
> The threat to the job, the cultivation of the ability, the survival of subjecthood — all of these anxieties collapse, when gathered, into the same thing: we are afraid of losing our sense of value. Afraid that one day we will wake up and find we are no longer useful to this world. Being laid off is just the outer shell of that fear. The core is older: a person’s deepest fear has never been having no job. It is the suspicion that one is no longer worthy.
On the one hand, they say that you will be out of a job in two years time. Forever.
On the other hand, we’re fed this touchy-feely nonsense about going to work. Weird, I thought we were going to be punched in the balls with real materialistic dread, some real labor disciplining that keeps us desperate and fearful, not getting mind-lobbied over how ow-owwy our feelings will be when we are no longer fit to have our labor commodity exploited by billionaires or perhaps trillionaires (who are worthy because they have assets).
> So: after AI takes everything, what remains is not some second-best refuge — it is the place where the sense of value was always meant to live. AI is a receding tide. It washes away all the external anchors we carelessly threw out over the years — title, output, the feeling of being needed — and forces us to swim back to the one center that the tide cannot reach.
The destruction of your income is actually withering away at your materialistic fetters that keeps you from spiritual self-realization.
> In that old essay I gave that center a definition
How many links of this author are we supposed to have referenced now? I’m imagining a web of nonsense, but I can’t attest to that.
In fact I didn’t read most of this piece.
> This year, friends who know me well call me radical: I hand designs to AI, code to AI, review drafts to AI; next I’m preparing to hand over testing too.
Today, the radical is the one who radically builds on non-deterministic foundations.
> The real purpose of being radical is one thing only: before the macro trend arrives, keep finding new ground to stand on. All the time AI saves you must flow into growth and exploration — not into more requirements. This is a discipline I set for myself, and a sentence I repeat in every reply: if the dividends of efficiency get eaten entirely by workload, then this revolution is meaningless to the individual.
The real purpose of being a radical is being a bloodless grinder.
Yeah that’s about as much as I expected from someone writing about how a force might wipe out their income. From a software engineering perspective.
> To close, I want to return to those Luddites who smashed machines in the night.
Now let’s return to the Luddites and pretend that they were the only ones who rebelled against industrial society and that they only failed. Some real 12-hour days in the factory grindset.
> Back to the question in the first letter:
Could not meander more. Or, did you perhaps forget to refer to another essay here?
> But the answer to that question doesn’t depend on AI. It depends on where you are standing when that day comes: at the end of the assembly line, stamping approval on the machine’s output with an ever-lower bar, waiting for even the stamping to be optimized away? Or further upstream — where the questions are picked, where the standards are set, where the logic is guarded, where the world is built.
The old school answer was to organize with others. But that was just when most people could get a job, or had to anyway. When labor itself is about to be wiped out? Double down on being a bloodless hustler.
> The wind rises in the reeds. The great trend is never some monolith descending from the sky — it is composed of the choices of countless individuals in this very moment. to refuse to lower your standard for the sake of speed, to invest the saved hours into an exploration no one has done before — these tiny decisions are themselves the trend.
Yeah, what do I do when I am the author and think that the inevitability of tech is going to eat my livelihood? What rousing speech to manifest?
> The decision you make today to push the logical chain through on paper before opening the chat window,
Beyond embarrassing.
Pick a lane. You can’t scaremonger about AI Inevitability and have a rousing speech about the tiny decisions of Opening the Chat Window.
At the very least apply it at a higher level: specification, proofs, anything but generating Rust/Java/C and then letting yourself or an agent babysit it.
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