Efficient markets route around bottlenecks. Technological revolutions accelerate the speed at which that re-routing happens.
In software, we, the developers, have increasingly been a bottleneck. The world needs WAY more software than we can economically provide, and at long last a technology has arrived that will help route around us for the benefit of humanity.
Here's an excellent Casey Handmer quote from a recent Dwarkesh episode:
> One way to think about the industrial revolutions is [...] what you're doing is you're finding some way of bypassing a constraint or bypassing a bottleneck. The bottleneck prior to what we call the Industrial Revolution was metabolism. How much oats can a human or a horse physically digest and then convert into useful mechanical output for their peasant overlord or whatever? Nowadays we would giggle to think that the amount of food we produce is meaningful in the context of the economic power of a particular country. Because 99% of the energy that we consume routes around our guts, through the gas tanks of our cars and through our aircraft and in our grids and stuff like that.
> Right now, the AI revolution is about routing around cognitive constraints, that in some ways writing, the printing press, computers, the Internet have already allowed us to do to some extent. A credit card is a good example of something that routes around a cognitive constraint of building a network of trust. It's a centralized trust.
> In software, we, the developers, have increasingly been a bottleneck. The world needs WAY more software than we can economically provide, and at long last a technology has arrived that will help route around us for the benefit of humanity.
Everything you wrote here is directly contradicted by casual observation of reality.
Developers aren't a bottleneck. If they were, we wouldn't be in a historic period of layoffs. And before you say that AI is causing the layoffs -- it's not. They started before AI was widely used for production, and they're also being done at companies that aren't heavily using AI anyway. They're a result of massive over-hiring during periods of low interest rates.
Beyond that, who is demanding software developers? The things that make our lives better (like digital forms at the doctor's office) aren't complex software.
The majority of the demand is from enshittification companies making our lives worse with ads and surveillance. No one is demanding developers, but certainly individual humans aren't demanding them.
Yes, the layoffs are a market correction initiated by non-AI factors, such as the end of the ZIRP era.
The world is chock-full of important, society-scale problems that have been out of reach because the economics have made them costly to work on and therefore risky to invest in. Lowering the cost of software development de-risks investment and increases the total pool of profitable (or potentially profitable) projects.
The companies that will work on those new problems are being conceived or born right now, and [collectively] they'll need lots of AI-native software devs.
> important, society-scale problems that have been out of reach because the economics have made them costly to work on and therefore risky to invest in
What are examples of these projects and how will AI put them back into reach of investment?
It is likewise unreasonable to look down on any kind of world model from the past. Remember that you, in 2026, are benefitting from millions of aggregate improvements to a world model that you've absorbed passively through participation in society, and not through original thought. You have a different vantage point on many things as a result of the shoulders of giants you get to stand on.
i used to use last.fm with winamp and the like. that needed scrobbling plugins. nowadays, i use it with spotify, and it's pretty simple: (1) make an account on last.fm. (2) go into spotify settings → social → connected apps, and add it in.
Direct quote from RJ Scaringe, founder/CEO of Rivian:
> This is a decision. It's generated, I said there's many millions of decisions, many of them will never get noticed and they're just under the surface. One of those decisions that's been noticed quite a bit is the fact that we've intentionally not included CarPlay in the vehicle. And that's not to say we don't think a close partnership with Apple is important. So we have Apple Music integration, we have a bunch of Apple integrations that are yet to come, we have a great relationship with the team at Apple. But it was more to say, we just felt and continue to feel very strongly about creating a consistent, fully integrated digital experience where you're not jumping between apps, let's say from a CarPlay app back to the vehicle app. And it's quite jarring when you don't have, let's say vehicle level controls when you're in the CarPlay environment. That view we've had since the early, early days. I think that's going to become even more important and more true in a world of integrated AI.
I can think of an easy way to have the controls accessible no matter what's going on on the touchscreen, but then again that's probably what disqualifies me from being the CEO of a big car company.
Take that idea of buttons and knobs and just replace it with another ipad. Make it revolutionary, put the ipad in the middle of the steering wheel, boom.
What about several mini ipads, each dedicated to a single function? We could use OLED displays and pre-burn-in their function at the factory as a label, and leave the display off, except for maybe a single LED, to save power. We could also add some sort of haptic feedback on user interaction with each mini ipad...
make the steering wheel an ipad and swipe to turn!
You could really future-proof the car if you replace the windshield with an ipad. then you can overlay ads on reality just like they do in soccer games.
Rivian's infotainment system uses Google Maps which I am not a big fan of. I wish they would support CarPlay in addition to everything else, so that I wouldn't lose my maps.
I prefer Google Maps. Apple Maps lead me astray too often and though they are better than they used to be they still give weird directions (such as using more obscure state route names for roads rather than the dominant Interstate Higway name).
CarPlay would be a complete non-issue for me, its absence would even be a positive. I just use my phone anyway; integrating it with the car is just added hassle and one less thing I have to worry about remaining compatible 5-10 years from now.
I see CarPlay (and CarPlay Ultra) as being for auto makers who don't want to put in all the effort to design and drive a good proprietary UI (CarPlay is a godsend in cars with crappy UI, i.e. most of them).
Rivian is a luxury vehicle brand with a first-class UI/UX. I imagine going with their own first-class UI and CarPlay Ultra would be a mess; two separate interfaces for the same controls, but laid out differently. Makes a lot more sense they'd be working with Apple to integrate more Apple features into their own UI, rather than having to maintain two separate first-class UIs that are bound to have discrepancies.
And there's the more obvious answer that they want the entire driving experience to feel like a Rivian experience, given how important that's been for luxury EVs on the software side. Supporting a canned OS would make the vehicle "feel" the same as every other car that also supports it.
Bullshit response. It would cost Rivian nothing to allow Apple (and Android) devices to use the monitor in the car as a second screen to be able to play music and whatnot, they just don’t want to to increase vendor lock in.
They could easily make their screen compatible with Carplay/Android Auto and provide whatever experience Rivian wants to at the same time, and they could let the drivers choose which to use.
And I write this as someone with a Model Y who does not miss Carplay (although it would be nice to have).
It’s not a bullshit response. It’s hidden in swathes of typical CEO bullshit corp-speak, but underneath that he’s clear that they’ve made the deliberate decision to be responsible for the full infotainment UX/UI, despite the trade-offs this brings.
We may both disagree with their decision, but that doesn’t mean the explanation is bullshit.
And to be fair, as you point out, if they do a really good job with the UI/UX (as Tesla have mostly done) then you’ll probably not miss CarPlay most of the time.
Could they? I've been told Apple certifies every car before they allow carplay and this costs a lot. I can't verify (the people who tell me this are under NDA and so won't speak on the record)
You'll need to spend an additional $1500 over 10 years for Rivian Connect+ to use music streaming services on their infotainment system. No additional cellular costs for using CarPlay or Android Auto.
economic value is distinct from social value. the former can be used to describe small groups (e.g. criminals who benefit from a crime), while the latter can be used to describe the negative sum relationship between criminals and their victims.
so, "positive [economic] value [for some]" and "negative [social] value on net" are not mutually exclusive.
Well, I was referring to its social value. A positive value solely for criminals is hardly an excellent economic indicator and I’m a bit surprised you would argue otherwise.
This seems obviously wrong? Any system whose name includes the word "forecast" was built to predict the future in some domain / over some time horizon / to some level of granularity.
nope, this is Mira Murati's thinking machines. she used to be the CTO of OpenAI, but started her own thing once she [I think] realized that she was missing out on the gold rush by staying there.
I also tend to put a Makefile into the root of any repo I work in (ignored via .git/info/exclude), so that shell commands relevant to my workflow can accumulate under that Makefile. I've been doing this for at least 10 years and love it. Most repos have some sort of a cli interface, but that doesn't mean that they're any good. Make is nice way to wrap all of them, and to standardize on at least the build/test/run commands across many disparate repos.
I just want to hack together something that works for my use case. If I can share that with the wider team, that is superb. But I really don't enjoy my hacky utils being subject to tedious code review scrutiny they don't deserve.
To be clear, I _do_ add utils that I think will be useful to the common repo, subject to review, and mostly they will be merged. But if it gets painful, I just retract the PR and keep it locally.
Have you ever tried to submit a PR of your Makefile to the maintainers of, say, an open source npm package? If you have, what compelling story were you able to tell about that Makefile that got the maintainers to merge your PR? And after they successfully merged it, did you continue putting up PR after PR for each successive round of tweaks to that Makefile?
What an extraordinary amount of unnecessary effort that would be. My workflow does not belong to the repo, it belongs to me. The only thing that belongs in the repo is all the shared workflows (or the elements they comprise.)
In software, we, the developers, have increasingly been a bottleneck. The world needs WAY more software than we can economically provide, and at long last a technology has arrived that will help route around us for the benefit of humanity.
Here's an excellent Casey Handmer quote from a recent Dwarkesh episode:
> One way to think about the industrial revolutions is [...] what you're doing is you're finding some way of bypassing a constraint or bypassing a bottleneck. The bottleneck prior to what we call the Industrial Revolution was metabolism. How much oats can a human or a horse physically digest and then convert into useful mechanical output for their peasant overlord or whatever? Nowadays we would giggle to think that the amount of food we produce is meaningful in the context of the economic power of a particular country. Because 99% of the energy that we consume routes around our guts, through the gas tanks of our cars and through our aircraft and in our grids and stuff like that.
> Right now, the AI revolution is about routing around cognitive constraints, that in some ways writing, the printing press, computers, the Internet have already allowed us to do to some extent. A credit card is a good example of something that routes around a cognitive constraint of building a network of trust. It's a centralized trust.
It's a great episode, I recommend it: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/casey-handmer
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