I just gave it a go at a problem I've been working on this week. Nothing fancy, just some inefficient code that we've been adding incremental improvements to for a while now to the point where some out-of-box thinking is probably required to push it any further – something Fable is obviously more than capable of.
After Fable did some thinking for a few minutes it gave some suggestions. A couple of them were valid – but very low impact, bordering on entirely pointless – but it's main suggestion.. It told me to make an update that would very clearly break the existing functionality.
So I thought about it for a moment...
Hm, I mean, I guess we could do that if we also did x, y & z to mitigate the behaviour change – maybe that's what Fable was thinking?
I replied, explaining that it would change the behaviour, assuming it would explain what it was thinking given there was clearly more to it. But no, it just said it was wrong.
This isn't some super advanced or complex code either. Had I gave this question to a senior engineer in a technical interview and they gave the answer Fable gave me I would view that very negatively. I was expecting something creative and interesting, not irrelevant + incorrect.
I'm sure it's a step up from 4.8 (although am not interested in burning the tokens to find out), but this clearly isn't as significant a change as some are implying. I'm sure if I asked it to come up with some out-of-box suggestions it could, but any competent engineer would have realised that by themselves.
I was going to comment something similar and I've had similar experiences.
It's a different form a consciousness for sure, almost like you're repeatedly waking up in the moment you're in, but there is repeated momentary awareness there.
Although I'll hedge a little bit and say that perhaps no memory at all would imply those moments are so short there is no real experience to be had. What I experienced was just enough to form the thought "I am here", before restarting the loop.
Chronic inflammation is almost certainly part of this and lots of things about our modern ways of living cause higher levels of inflammation.
- Obesity and sugary drinks/food
- Various chemicals we use in agriculture, food products, cleaning, etc
- Lack of sleep
- Lack of exercise
- Stress
- Pharmaceuticals. And to be clear because I know this will be more controversial, I'm not anti-pharma, but lots of people today are being prescribed daily medication at ever young ages. We know many of these pharmaceuticals can marginally increase certain cancer risks.
- Low Vit D levels – seriously everyone should be supplementing
- Vaccines? Probably not, but I dunno... Call me a conspiracy theorist if you want, but if you're on your 5th Covid shot I feel like you might be putting your body at some marginally increased inflammatory risk there. Vaccines are quite literally deigned to induce inflammation to boost immune response after all.
- More radiation emitting devices – not sure about this one because I haven't done any research, but when I was younger people used to talk about this quite seriously and now it feels like something only conspiracy theorists say. I suspect there is some amount of truth to it even if 5G isn't going to literally give you cancer.
I think it would be more surprising if we didn't see an increase in cancer rates to be honest.
> - Low Vit D levels – seriously everyone should be supplementing
> - More radiation emitting devices
Yeah you should absolutely not be going out in the sun for your vitamin D if you believe the latter to be a cause because the sun emits many orders of magnitude more radiation than human made devices in daily use.
I admitted my ignorance. But what are you saying here? That base radiation exposure isn't likely to be higher today than it was in the past or that it's likely an insignificant increase for most people?
Another problem is that US models are all closed source, and if you're a large corporate you may not want your org to be held hostage by OpenAI / Anthropic.
I genuinely don't understand what moat these US model labs have. If they're saying recursive self improvement is just around the corner and Chinese labs are only slightly behind the leading US models, what moat does the US labs have? Are the US models going to recursively self improve better than the Chinese open source ones or something?
I might be completely wrong about this, but if I had money in OpenAI or Anthropic I'd be pulling it all right now. I think the chance of them going to near-zero over the next few years is very significant.
> you may not want your org to be held hostage by OpenAI / Anthropic
Or Google. I'm working with multiple customers right now that are very pissed at Google for deprecating Gemini 2.5 Flash, canning the GA release of 3.0 Flash and now have to decide whether to bite the bullet of the 5x price increase for 3.5 Flash or switching providers. Quite a few of them will likely fully pivot to open models.
I'd be curious if any of your customers have tried 3.1 Flash Lite. It's cheaper than 2.5 Flash, and in my experience with the free tier, quite an upgrade in terms of quality of response. My suspicion is that Google is killing off the old models because they aren't a good value for the customer or for themselves.
Most of them are using it for data extraction use-cases on complex where they are already in a tricky cost vs. quality compromise. Some of them have evaluated 3.1 Flash Lite but for all of them it performed worse than 2.5 Flash and below requirement.
The only ones I've seen switch to 3.1 Flash Lite were from 2.5 Flash Lite, and all for the most simple use cases, e.g. small UX enhancements.
i dont think its going to automatically prevent others. super claude might understand why diversity is important. if were talking sci fi scenarios the most likely one is probably overwatch (multiple independent ais with gray ethics and complicated relationships) more than skynet.
I was obsessed with creating tech startups in my bedroom before I even knew what the term "startup" meant.
I was showing a friend a hosting service I built and he told me to check out Hacker News. This must have been around 2009.
Discovering HN quite literally changed my life in various ways. It's genuinely insane how much this site, and that conversation, has directly and indirectly been the source of various branches my life has taken.
Things were so fun and dynamic back then. This was back when people would post weird weekend projects here and within a few months were millionaires. I'm sure it still happens, but much less frequently.
I don't think HN is anti-AI anymore? Your perspective is the most popular perspective here.
When I was saying that we were getting agents to code junior-level stuff mid last year and that we'd probably be able to do similar with senior engineers soon, people were pushing back hard. Some people were still parroting the line they heard from others – that AI is just a stochastic parrot that just parrots stuff it's seen before.
Today? Yeah, basically everyone agrees that in the vast majority of cases you probably shouldn't be writing code by hand. I think the only nuance left is to what extent you need to understand what's been written. For now if you have a product with consumers you probably do need to understand what you're shipping. Vibe coding something with AI vs an experienced SWE using AI to write code they design is still a very different process, but increasingly we're moving towards a world where most code doesn't need to be understood. I know the way we're building now we're trying to minimise the need for that via harness engineering.
This was a good summary. I feel similar. At this point I think 95% of the skills I've developed over the 2 decades are basically useless. Prior to 2023 I felt like every new skill only made me more employable, but now I don't really see any software skills that are safe from AI today. Even the ones that are very likely won't be in a year or two so there's no point in learning.
I've said this in other threads, but it concerns me how little the average person is preparing for what's coming right now... It seems people are making decisions as if their jobs and income are safe when in reality their entire profession could be gone in less than a decade. People in this comment thread saying crap like "yea, but the code LLMs write still isn't that good by my standards" are totally missing the trend. The fact LLMs are even one-shotting extremely technically difficult problems was something almost no one thought they'd be able to do by now a couple of years ago. Even I as someone who pushed back against this and thought they would become extremely competent within years am genuinely amazed at just how good they are. Trust me, regardless of your opinions, your job and career is at risk.
Another thing to understand is that if AI replaces workers in a variety of fields from SWE, accounting, customer support, graphic design, etc. Then it's likely going to be hard to fine other jobs to pivot into because when unemployment increases that significantly everyone will competing for the same limited number of jobs. Some will fine something, but most will struggle to find anything.
I hear a lot of people talking about how they'll just go into 'x' field if AI comes for their job, but realistically you'll need years of reskilling and you're assuming that in a world where other people are also losing their jobs, and where AI is touching ever more forms of work, that you'll easily be able to get a job in that other field. And I'm not saying that won't happen, just that this isn't as realistic or as safe of a bet as some people seem to think it is. You're also likely deluded about how hard it is to find work because you've been in software for the last decade.
Please, please, please, start preparing for what's coming. The economy is going to get extremely rough over the next 10 years. You need to be prepared to be without income for years, if not indefinitely.
1) How long has full self driving been just six months away? The last mile often tends out to be the hard part.
2) If the catastrophic scenario comes true where white collar work essentially disappears, what does "preparing" actually mean? There's not a whole lot I can do about that. It's like trying to make plans for what I'm going to do if I get into a coma.
> 1) How long has full self driving been just six months away? The last mile often tends out to be the hard part.
I agree. I'm not arguing there will be no human drivers, no human coders, etc. I'm arguing there will be much, much less demand to the point where it will be like trying to obtain a career as a Hollywood actor or something. It's not that there are no actors, and if you want to be an actor realistically you might be able to find the odd job here and there, but the demand won't be there like it is today and you'll struggle to live if that's what you're betting your income on.
> 2) If the catastrophic scenario comes true where white collar work essentially disappears, what does "preparing" actually mean? There's not a whole lot I can do about that. It's like trying to make plans for what I'm going to do if I get into a coma.
Catastrophic scenarios are largely unavoidable, I'd agree with that. Some possible scenarios of AI however not catastrophic, but extremely bad – political corruption, poverty, civilisation collapse.
You can and should prepare for stuff like this to some extent. One specific risk you can prep for is attacks on critical infrastructure (energy, food, water) – and arguably these may become quite likely in the near future.
My general thought is civilizational collapse, sectoral devastation to white-collar work, etc., are things where my preparation is not going to count for that much. Like sure, maybe I have stuff in the pantry and some bottled water, maybe I try to keep up with what's happening in the world. But ultimately these are not issues that can be resolved through one person acting alone.
The fact the whole world is going down with me is of some help actually. I can't stop the world. There is no preparing for that. We'll figure something out and if not, then not.
My non-tech friends will not suddenly be able to run servers or oversee AI systems. They will come to me with their ideas and I will turn the crank. My role will probably be named differently, something like "Intent Manager" or "Architecture Developer" or whatever but I have a strong feeling much of it will basically remain the same. The politics, the egos, the personality differences, AI has changed nothing in that regard. The jocks will not suddenly sit in front of laptops prompting Claude to debug their MQTT setups. You can say AI will do that and sure it will, prompted by me. If AI will do it autonomously then we're all fucked and I don't care about my "career" by that point. It'll be survival of the species time.
Much of accounting could have been automated. A good friend of mine has been manually entering paper receipts and whatever for well over 20 years now and his work load has actually increased. It's all automatable, but there are so. much. more. levers. Possible != will happen.
I do agree it's not the time to empty your savings account. Get ready for some rough times.
> The fact the whole world is going down with me is of some help actually. I can't stop the world. There is no preparing for that. We'll figure something out and if not, then not.
Depends on the scenario. If most humans are economically useless your primary risk is going to be starvation and the consequences of civilisation collapse. These are things you can prep for to some extent.
If you don't have a family then I understand not caring and letting whatever comes come. If you have people you love however, then I believe you have a duty to at least try to protect them from what's coming. But that's just the way I see it.
Also consider there are ways to prep without creating a bunker.. Can you collect and sterilise water? Can you grow/produce some food? Do you have assets that will be valuable in such a crisis (gold, etc)? Do you have a first aid kit or two? Do you have fuel/energy sources in case the grid goes offline?
I think it's probably worth thinking about some of the scenarios here and seeing which you can reasonably prep for, assuming you agree with most experts that there's a reasonable chance this will all go horribly wrong.
I suppose the first was just learning about NNs and realising that this was the first time I'd ever heard a way to make computers theoretically think like humans.
Deep neural networks working in the early 2010s was another because that was a unlock for a whole new paradigm of computing.
2021 I freaked out when LLMs started to become useful at writing code. Enough so that I invested a significant amount of my net worth into Google at this point assuming that coders at about a decade left.
The day ChatGPT dropped in late November I felt physically sick. I remember the day well. I was visiting family and was like a ghost. Trying to explain that something that I was worrying about for a long-time was here was near impossible (and to long extent still is).
There was a moment in early 2025 when I realised agentic coding was becoming very competent and was solving actual problems with very minimal instructions. To this point I was worried theoretically that AI could replace human coders, but had not seen examples in practise.
Mid-2025 someone non-technical said they'd been building an app, and I was sceptical it could do what they said. I was blown away by what they were able to build.
Nov-2025 a non-technical person on my team wrote a build a product from scratch to manage a range things within our business. This was non-trivial software that would have taken a team of developers a year or two to have built previously.
In early 2026 coding agents regularly wrote code better than myself, repeatedly humbling me that the decades of effort I had to put into this craft was now more or less redundant.
At some point very soon I'd expect to see very advanced software products being one-shotted and clear evidence of recursive self-improvement.
Remember in just 3 years ChatGPT has gone from being almost useless to extremely senior programers no longer writing code. Things will change in unimaginable ways from here and you should be ready for that.
After Fable did some thinking for a few minutes it gave some suggestions. A couple of them were valid – but very low impact, bordering on entirely pointless – but it's main suggestion.. It told me to make an update that would very clearly break the existing functionality.
So I thought about it for a moment...
Hm, I mean, I guess we could do that if we also did x, y & z to mitigate the behaviour change – maybe that's what Fable was thinking?
I replied, explaining that it would change the behaviour, assuming it would explain what it was thinking given there was clearly more to it. But no, it just said it was wrong.
This isn't some super advanced or complex code either. Had I gave this question to a senior engineer in a technical interview and they gave the answer Fable gave me I would view that very negatively. I was expecting something creative and interesting, not irrelevant + incorrect.
I'm sure it's a step up from 4.8 (although am not interested in burning the tokens to find out), but this clearly isn't as significant a change as some are implying. I'm sure if I asked it to come up with some out-of-box suggestions it could, but any competent engineer would have realised that by themselves.
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