Brian Hatt

Entrepreneur, full-stack/ai engineer. Truth seeker.

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

https://t.co/vLmiBKTtX3

[Danny Bernstein 🍇🥬 @bernsteind]

autonomous robot driving through the field at night. no chemicals. no pesticides. just UV light killing pathogens and pests while everyone sleeps. this is @tricrobotics.

this is what chemical-free pest control looks like at scale.

[sarah guo @saranormous]

https://t.co/Hw02laH9yp

[Santiago Capital @SantiagoAuFund]

whatever you think about Rubio on a personal level...this is one hell of a quote.

[Brian Hatt @TheBrianHatt]

@r0ktech Who else feels mildly guilty after berating claude

[Vercel Developers @vercel_dev]

Introducing deepsec, an open source coding security harness.

• CLI-first
• Sandbox-based scaling
• Pluggable coding agents
• Designed for large-scale repos
• Use AI Gateway or your own subscription

After months of successful internal use, we put it to the test on some of the largest open source codebases.
https://t.co/sPxZ6izJVV

[Benji Taylor @benjitaylor]

Making something people love is mostly making something you love and hoping the overlap is real

[Jon Erlichman @JonErlichman]

“Nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.”

~ John Cleese

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

We live in an era of admiration of hysteria, neuroticism, and narcissism. Endless waves of panic, perpetual emotional incontinence. You know the answer…

[eburke @JamesWHankins1]

We'd be grateful to anyone and all who could help Allen Guelzo and I promote our new Substack, The Golden Thread, which is meant to interest readers and support teachers of our 2-vol. work. We are trying to bring back the study of Western civilization after 40 years of neglect. https://t.co/1vSI23GNm1 @JeremyTate41 @CLT_Exam @EncounterBooks @firstthingsmag @NASorg @ClaremontInst @ufhamilton @MadisonProgram

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Claude knows! —>

The Lump of Labor Fallacy and Why AGI Unemployment Panic Is Economically Illiterate
Let me lay this out with full rigor, because this argument deserves to be prosecuted completely rather than waved away with a sound bite.

I. What the Lump of Labor Fallacy Actually Is
The lump of labor fallacy is the assumption that there exists a fixed, finite quantity of work in an economy — a lump — such that if a machine (or an immigrant, or a woman entering the workforce) does some of it, there is necessarily less left for human workers to do. It treats employment as a zero-sum pie.
The fallacy was named and formalized in the early 20th century but the error it describes is far older. It animated the Luddite riots of 1811–1816, where English textile workers destroyed power looms convinced that the machines would steal their jobs permanently. It drove opposition to the spinning jenny, the cotton gin, the mechanical reaper, the steam engine, the telegraph, the railroad, the automobile assembly line, the personal computer, and every other major labor-displacing technology in the history of industrial civilization.
Every single time, the catastrophists were wrong. Not partially wrong. Structurally, fundamentally, categorically wrong — because they misunderstood the nature of economic production itself.
The reason the fixed-pie assumption fails is this: demand is not fixed. Work generates income. Income generates demand for goods and services. Demand for goods and services generates new categories of work. This is an engine, not a reservoir. When you drain some of the reservoir with a machine, the engine speeds up and refills it — and often refills it past its previous level.

II. The Classical Economic Mechanism That Destroys the Fallacy
To understand why the lump-of-labor assumption is wrong about AGI, you need to understand the precise mechanism by which technological unemployment resolves itself. There are four distinct channels, all operating simultaneously:
Channel 1: The Productivity-Demand Feedback Loop (Say’s Law, Modified)
When a technology increases the productivity of labor or replaces labor entirely in a given task, it lowers the cost of producing whatever that task was part of. Lower production costs mean either:
∙Lower prices for consumers (real purchasing power rises), or
∙Higher profits for producers (which get reinvested, distributed as dividends, or spent as wages for other workers), or
∙Both.
Either way, aggregate real income in the economy rises. That additional real income does not evaporate. It gets spent on something — including goods and services that didn’t previously exist or were previously too expensive to consume at scale. That spending creates demand. That demand creates jobs.
This is not a theoretical conjecture. The average American in 1900 spent roughly 43% of their income on food. Today it’s around 10%. Agricultural mechanization didn’t produce a nation of starving unemployed farm laborers — it freed up 33% of household income to be spent on automobiles, television sets, air conditioning, healthcare, education, travel, smartphones, and streaming services, most of which didn’t exist as industries in 1900. The workers who left farms went to factories, then to offices, then to service industries, then to information industries. The economy didn’t run out of work. It metamorphosed.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

- Drafted a blog post
- Used an LLM to meticulously improve the argument over 4 hours.
- Wow, feeling great, it’s so convincing!
- Fun idea let’s ask it to argue the opposite.
- LLM demolishes the entire argument and convinces me that the opposite is in fact true.
- lol

The LLMs may elicit an opinion when asked but are extremely competent in arguing almost any direction. This is actually super useful as a tool for forming your own opinions, just make sure to ask different directions and be careful with the sycophancy.

[Brian Hatt @TheBrianHatt]

@travisakers Was thinking the same although maybe it’s simply that so many other things have improved it just seems worse

[Brian Hatt @TheBrianHatt]

@gdb and it will be a drop in the bucket

[Angie Jones @techgirl1908]

We used to hunt the bug down in the codebase with our bare eyes

[HackerRank @hackerrank]

"Claude usage limit reached. Your limit will reset at 7 AM"

[Brian Hatt @TheBrianHatt]

@DominikTornow 🎯 real

[Tesla Aaron L @TeslaAaronL]

2026 will be a banger year

[Jay Bhattacharya @DrJBhattacharya]

One of the worst sins of the disinformation-censorship regime is hubris. It relies on the folly that a small cabal of poorly trained bureaucrats and their pet scientists possesses the unerring capacity to distinguish true from false on every complex scientific topic. It's nuts.

[Aaron Levie @levie]

https://t.co/lXehx9mkQJ