Wednesday, April 23, 2025
AI is not coming for your job
Read it all, as they say, but here is the conclusion:
I use AI tools every day. They write a majority of my code for me. This is what it’s good at: looking at the extremely formulaic structure of computer code and producing a plausible guess at what should come next. It guesses right, or close enough to right, often enough to save me a lot of effort. The phrase is becoming cliché already, but it’s true that these tools are glorified auto-complete. This isn’t an insult — autocomplete is a godsend, and LLM tech radically increases its utility. It lets me get a lot more done, and that’s a good thing.
But I’m also aware of what it’s not. It’s not a substitute for human judgement. It’s terrible at true originality and ideation, hopeless at analysis and design outside of well-worn patterns. It can’t experiment and iterate to save its life. It’s good at greenfield development, generating output from whole cloth, but remarkably bad at integrating what came before and expanding upon it.
Not only is Devin vaporware, the vibe coders larping as him via Cursor are creating world-class messes they don’t understand that the tool can’t fix for them. Like a novice programmer, their power to generate code far exceeds their ability to understand or maintain it as it grows.
None of this is to write off the obvious utility of AI tools. Knowledge workers will see a large boost to their productivity by using them, just as they did from adopting the word processor, the spreadsheet, photoshop, CAD, and Salesforce. The robots are wonderful servants, and in time we’ll wonder how we ever got by without them.
But knowledge workers won’t be replaced by our tools, or at least not by these ones. LLMs aren’t capable of true intelligence, reasoning or agency the way a human is. They’ll need their human benefactors to hold their hands and verify every little task, now and in the future. And we should be thankful they’re here to help, not fearful they’ll replace us.
Tuesday, April 22, 2025
I'll bet it was quite the ride
21 April 1961. USAF Major Robert Michael "Bob" White piloted the X-15-2, 56-6671 research aeroplane from Edwards Air Force Base in California on its first flight at full throttle, reaching a speed of 3,074 mph at an altitude of 79,000 feet, before climbing to 105,100 feet.
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