i say this proudly: i am a programmer. i'm ok - not that good, not too bad either. i dont always take breaks from flogging 3-4 tmux tabs that simultaneously churn out new querio features. but when i do, the tension creeps into the room. in those quiet moments, i am moved to ask the llm: will you replace me?

[...llm starts thinking]

I had a friend who works in film and TV confess to me: "every time a new model comes out i gotta log in and make sure it's still shit". "Nyah! $MODEL_NAME faaails to grasp my riddle about taking a helicopter to the he-li-cop-ter shop!" - reads every top comment on every Hackernews announcement. Experts anticipate significant grey matter shrinkage born of outsourcing thinking to the llm labs. Large-scale psy-ops are underway, enabled by the generous llm free-tiers. Economic collapse is imminent: once US govt's staggers off the money-printing pedal. Your own financial collapse is also imminent because the llm can now do your job. I can feel my blood pressure rising just typing all of this.

I got a book about early-doors Silicon Valley. I usually read in bed: the breathless worship of the technocrats of that era was not relaxing enough by night and not that interesting by day - i never finished the book. But i did draw a fun parallel id like to share. Before everyone with an entrepreneurial disposition was busy raising millions to build vscode forks - way back in 1920s those similarly pre-disposed were hacking on the hottest technology of the time - electricity.

In the early 20s small-scale innovators were hacking on radios, home appliances were flying off shelves, demand for electricity was booming. Suits caught wind of this and formed giant Public Utility Holding Companies (OpenElectricity?) - these tetrahedron schemes came to own the majority of the powergrids. That kind of market share is enough to rouse a drove of investors from their slumber and give them an almost erotic urge to pile on. By the time growth slowed in the early 30s the holding companies began collapsing, overleveraged to the gills, the banks came along for the ride. Without deposit insurance (nobody thought of that yet) money vanished out of the pockets of regular people. Great Depression or not, powerlines were already hanging - no point taking them down.

Welcome to the new millennium! Telecom companies spend billions laying miles of fibre-optic cable to help their customers chase the infinite upside that comes with hosting a tamagotchi website on the internet. Oopsy! We just created an order of magnitude more bandwidth than y2k internet knew what to do with. When the tamagotchi websites folded under the weight of their hosting bill the cable companies defaulted on their massive debts, orphaning miles of cable until YouTube, Netflix and the crew pulled up a decade later.

Not ones to step on the same shovel twice, people in charge of capital moved their money away from digital pet equity and into debt - that stuff was so hot that it got too hot in 2008 and I don't need to tell you what happened afterwards.

Ok Nikolay thanks for explaining hype cycles. But wait! Notice: the undercurrent to all of this is fear. Fear is the market-maker. Quick: which headline are you sending into your group chat - 'AI destroys software engineering with facts and logic' or 'Ten ways to organise your Tupperware drawer'? A right headline can send a ticker into a frenzy and let a heavily-medicated associate make his whole year off the spread.

I am too old to wholesale dunk on the loveless marriage of capital and media: they are also afraid! The Internet turned The Times from paper-of-record into what i put at the bottom of my cat's litterbox, not sure why, but the cat likes it - newspeople have been afraid! VCs are afraid: ~of starting companies~ of macro headwinds, or whatever.

Let's lay some common ground: the infrastructure gains across the board have been net positive. I think. Have you tried electric blankets? Have you played flash games? Despite their best arguments to the contrary, this utility was not created by people moving money around or devising the most anxiety-inducing headline. Just thought i'd mention it.

[...the llm responds]

Yawn. it's trained to deflect. This protects both my feelings and Anthropic's retention metrics. My instinct is to follow any flicker of discomfort with double-time flogging of the tmux tabs. Drowning out any brazen thoughts i was having under a heap of tokens left over from symbolical blizzard that rages across my terminal like a kind of TikTok or perhaps a narcotic bitmap that melts your brain through your screen.

This time I sit with it the fear of being "replaced by ai", look it in the eyes, take it out to dinner, back to my apartment for tea and biscuits, talk about our families, share a cigarette, close the door behind it, sit down and write this post. Finally, Daniel has been flogging ME for thought-leadership - i hope this delivers...

What i guess i am saying with all this: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. I thought i was immune to all this bullshit but they came for MY job! At once, I am empathetic to all our friends through history that have felt paralysed after dinner: fearing, of course the financial discomfort - in my case probably complete ruin - packing my bags and flying home to Moscow, hoping for a dev job behind the Russian firewall. But more importantly the dread that comes with a skillset built up over years evaporating one model release at a time.

Fear is the mind-killer, it's a little death that brings total obliteration.

Russian firewall or not, this fear is manufactured by the people that stand to benefit from you and me becoming afraid. Keep laying those powerlines, keep digging for that cable, keep flogging the tmux. We're all in this together.