mkozlows

It always did, we just had the norm that in a liberal democracy, we put that to the side for our dealings with people. Same thing as religion -- a huge deal that shapes people's values and attitudes about the most core aspects of life -- and there was a norm of "no politics or religion" in polite conversation.

I believe that this is your opinion, but my own opinion (having also tried them, and used multiple generations of B&W ones before this) is that the screens look just fine, and that the slight downgrade of contrast isn't a big deal at all.

Yes, I replaced a B&W Sage with the Libra Colour, and used them for a bit side-by-side. Contrast (not sharpness) of B&W text is slightly worse with the color one, but not by so much that you'd notice it if you weren't comparing them next to each other. The resolution of actual color is worse, but obviously you can't get color at all on the B&W one, so hard to argue that this is a downgrade.

Unless you're a real contrast freak, I think most people would be slightly happier with the color than the B&W; but it's definitely not worth paying extra for.

It's true that developing junior devs is challenging (but it always was), but that's not what this is about: This is about the kind of not-that-good, mid-ass programmers who make up the silent bulk of the industry. The ones who have 20 years of experience, but who you still wouldn't trust to write fizzbuzz.

Those people are doomed. Which is fine in a lot of ways, but will be devastating for their economic prospects.

No, free tier was total garbage with GPT-5.

I think the article actually _does_ call that out, noting that the reason for some of these things is due to how wealth propagates through society, even noting the minimum wage specifically. (But it does bring to mind the Agatha Christie quote about never imagining she'd be so rich as to afford a car, nor so poor as to not have a maid.)

Also, though, I think some of the weird poverty-culture stuff of the Netherlands is just a culture thing. Netherlanders are absolutely rich enough to buy paper towel if they wanted to, it's just a cultural thing that they don't. And air conditioning is a whole cultural hot button flashpoint issue for reasons that have nothing to do with money.

Yes, but their newer write-up discusses that (and shows that the self-reported numbers have gone up radically, in a way that suggests that even if there is some inflation, the numbers are almost certainly positive if you deflate).

They also have an update -- linked from the original study! -- explaining that it's out of date and no longer reliable, and explaining why they had to cancel a follow-up study because it was understating productivity gains (but also was showing wins for the people who carried over from their previous study): https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/

The authors of this paper decided to ignore all of METR's follow-up data and discussion, and to report only the ancient number from early 2025 (a time when Windsurf was state of the art). And then, rather than apologizing for it, and caveating it as a number not to be taken seriously, they described it as a study done "recently."

That's either shockingly dishonest or incredibly out-of-touch.

Your PM can write the ticket, and your QA can test the output.

Yeah, this seriously drives me nuts.

That meeting that you spent an hour in to understand the requirements? You don't need that meeting if you're not writing the code. That sync up with the QA engineer you did to hand it off to them? Don't need that meeting if you're not writing the code. That half hour you spent installing vim extensions? Don't need 'em if you don't open vim anymore.

There are engineers whose jobs go well beyond coding, of course. Staff engineers and principal engineers have had their jobs radically change because of AI, but not because it's writing all their code.

But there are also a lot of engineers -- your standard mid-level engineer, or even senior engineers at a lot of orgs with title inflation -- whose job is almost entirely about delivering code, and who spend all day either writing code or engaging in scaffolding around code-writing activities. Let's not pretend that automating away that code writing is a 15% boost.

I feel like all you need to know about how seriously to take this is that they cite that ancient early-2025 METR study, and describe it in the text as "recently one even found..."

It's not a scam. Connecting to the grid has enormous value, and keeping the grid up has real costs. A model where your generation pays you retail prices doesn't make sense.

California's current net metering system, which is more reflective of the true benefits and costs of solar to the power system, has been incentivizing people to add storage to keep their solar rather than get paid big money to feed back midday low-value solar, which is a big win.

It really wasn't. Early streaming (like 2012-ish, after cord-cutting was possible but before it was mainstream) had Netflix and Hulu as the two major services, and so anything that was on streaming was on one of those two. But lots and lots of stuff just wasn't on streaming at all.

If you subscribed to Netflix back then, you probably subscribed to both the streaming and the disc-mailing plan, because there were enough things you couldn't get on streaming, so getting the discs was important to fill those gaps.

The point of this seems to be building on open hardware. If you want open source software that builds on proprietary hardware, KOReader is what you want. (I use it, it's great.)

I mean, a) regular consumers are just gonna buy a Kindle, do nothing with its software, and only buy books from Amazon. But also b) the way a lot of these hobby things expand is that if they get some market traction, someone starts making and selling pre-assembled, retail-friendly versions of the thing. Look at wacky keyboards, for instance: Used to be that you had to solder your own weird ergo split, now there are companies like ZSA and Keebio that'll make really nice versions as finished products.

This was also my thought, and I think holds true of the ones with invisible requirements that aren't stated up front and are only captured in tests. Oh, you need to rework your solution to handle requirements nobody mentioned before? Well, me too.

Yeah, it's testing a different thing than what the benchmark claims to test, but it's also accidentally testing something more real-world applicable than a clean benchmark would be, so hey.

(EDIT: That is, if the agent is allowed to see the failed tests and iterate. If not, then yeah, that's just a problem. And either way, the ones with tests that just encode a particular solution's implementation details, thereby demanding that your solution have some rando internal details, are junkier. That's not a situation you'd run into in reality.)

I kinda love that you made this post feel negative enough that a bunch of AI skeptics are enthusiastically agreeing with a post suggesting that the realistic, pragmatic bear case for AI is, uh, 2-3x productivity improvements.

These days, they mostly don't. California passed a law that required clarity (good), and now most things accurately say "license" instead of "buy."

(Not universally, but in many cases.)

Go to chat.z.ai right now and ask it about what happened in Tiananmen Square. Do you think it's good for the world if software is written by the model that answers that question that way?

No, I know what it is. But it's not as good as Claude Code or Codex. Harnesses matter for coding agents, it's not just the model. There's a reason Microsoft had to make its developers stop using Claude Code, and it's because they all found that Copilot sucked in comparison.

I mean, literally the answer is that nobody knows. Maybe the robots replace us all. Maybe they shift those who remain into being some combination of Product Manager and QA. Maybe there's still a role for a technical overseer even in the medium-long run.

But it sounds like you're really asking about the state of the world today. If so, I don't think that ideal state is like your friend's company (or at least, as it appeared to be to you). It might be possible that you can make that "dark factory" pattern work (StrongDM seems to be doing it), but it would require infrastructure and discipline that I doubt they're mustering. Think about how CD didn't involve taking a sloppy build process with no testing or observability and just going straight to prod -- it required building up a lot of infra and discipline first.

But on the other hand, I don't think the ideal present involves artisan hand-crafting code either. I haven't written a line of code by hand in enough months that it would genuinely feel weird if I were to try to program that way despite decades of having done just that. That era's done with, and moderate normie practices right now today are more about supervising and guiding agents than about chiseling code into clay tablets.

10% of a developer's cost is something like $4000/month. Many companies are complaining at a point that's well, well below that.

(I think they are being irrational, and that the mental model they have of AI costs -- "how much are we spending on tooling for this developer?" -- is going to shift over time to something more sensible, but those kinds of short-sighted companies are the ones that are having cost panics.)

If your company was giving you Copilot, they were never that far on board the AI train anyway.

Which is why one of the big problems for the field right now is that a) most code bases still need someone more skilled than a mere robot driver, and b) many developers are not better than that.

In the past, a team of five mid devs and one good one would be fine, because that good one would ride herd on the mid ones. But now those mid ones are slamming out robot code that they're incapable of meaningfully reviewing (because it's better than they are already), and they're just overwhelming the good dev's capacity.

The solution, of course, is to fire them all -- they're worthless now -- but this is not going to happen quickly, and it's probably for the best that it doesn't.

Most code they write is obviously fine. Much of the rest isn't obviously fine, but is in fact fine once you've gone through understanding it. But yes, there's some that still benefits from a human eye.

(For as long as that's true, "software developer" is still a job. It's not clear for how long it will be true.)

Completely disagree. I think this is one of the big wins of agentic engineering. When you look back at your own completed change and realize that you made it too complicated because your initial abstraction was wrong, you have to debate long and hard about whether it's worth going back and redoing the work -- is the abstraction actually that bad? Would you really get a huge win by changing it, enough to justify spending another day on the task?

But with the agent, you know that the change will be relatively quick and easy, so the bar to tell it to shift approaches is much, much lower.

Yeah, but I think there's a difference here: If your coworker puts up code that you don't understand quickly, in most environments people give it an approval, as withholding approval is meant to indicate that there's a problem with the code. It's very rare that you'd actually force them to wait to merge until they've explained the code to your satisfaction.

(There are workplaces where that's the norm, I know -- it tends to be a thing with smaller teams with codebases that everyone understands fully, and much less a thing with larger teams where different people have areas of the code they understand more than others.)

With AI code, though, it's _your code_ and you can't give it a lgtm, you actually need to dig at it until you do fully understand it, fully agree with it, and could justify it to a hostile reviewer. It's a different level of rigor.

Not all engineers apply that rigor, though, which becomes a problem.

You can also just use AI and keep the scale of your changes small rather than refactoring the whole app with a change? This isn't super-weird.

I was hoping that the web UI would be better -- I like Anthropic better than OpenAI from a values perspective and want to use their products, but ChatGPT in thinking mode has been just vastly better than claude.ai.So my fingers were crossed that these changes would bring it up to par.

But trying it out... alas, no. Simple factual questions where ChatGPT would go do a quick search and get the facts and report them back to me, get a "Great question! [totally invented bullshit]" from Claude, even with this new model and thinking set to high. I have to explicitly tell it to search to get it to look up basic facts, rather than it recognizing that it needs to do that, like GPT does.

5.2 still had a Codex variant, which this doesn't describe using. It also notably is not using the Codex harness -- it does everything with open source harnesses (which obviously are worse). And while it uses two harnesses with its cheap models, it only uses the worse-performing one of those with GPT 5.2 for cost reasons. (They also don't specify effort/thinking level used for GPT 5.2, but given that it performs worse in their baseline testing than obviously non-SOTA models, I'm guessing it wasn't set to anything high.)

Yeah, they conflate Microsoft's actions (which are not about cost) with a random quote from the "vice president of applied deep learning at Nvidia," who says that compute costs more than people on his team -- but his team isn't using LLMs for software development, they're literally a deep learning team that is burning compute in deep learning development ways.

If people would do even a little bit of math, they'd see that Microsoft can't possibly be paying more for AI than for developers: They have about 80K employees in product development roles. Senior developers probably cost them $400K all-in.

Do they have a $32 billion Claude bill? I suspect they do not.