Damn it they just upgraded models close to nih grant deadline again. The last good writer is gone. I used to communicate with claude and ask it to write and dispatch gpt for code and theory. Now we have two autistic model optimized just to code https://t.co/970dhlf9SR
Opus 4.8 Max is as autistic as it gets.
Ask a simple mildly underspecified query and read its chain of thoughts.
It’ll make you feel sorry to have asked that question.
@charliermarsh Sometimes they're a good reason to work on something. When people say a market is "crowded," what that often means is that there's a real problem and none of the solutions are good enough yet.
I think we have entered the golden era of lone researchers who can carry out the entire work themselves.
I bet many professors feel this way but choose not to say it publicly.
The confounding factor is that virtually every big company is overstaffed by 2-4x and has been for decades. AI is the catalyst/excuse to finally fix that. Of course nobody wants to say this out loud.
I was talking to a CS professor yesterday and he told me he's so relieved ⛱️ now that his PhD students have left for their summer internships.🌞. He finally gets to do interesting research himself again. It wasn't a complaint. Just something he'd been sitting with.
The old PhD bargain was pretty clean: professors had ideas, students had time, execution was the bridge. You did the work, and somewhere along the way, taste rubbed off.
That bridge is mostly gone now. A senior researcher with taste and a research agents ships faster than the same researcher plus a junior student. Explaining 🎙️ an idea to someone who doesn't yet have taste costs more than just building it. (the reason professor still needs students is because the research agent 🤖 is not yet capable enough)
Nobody wants to say this out loud
Professors keep mentoring because the system 🏫 asks them to, not because it's the highest-leverage thing they could be doing with their week.
The thing that still matters —> taste <— was never really taught. It was supposed to leak out of the execution. Now there's no execution to leak from.
Hamming's talk is so important that I reproduced it on my site. It's one of the only things on my site written by someone else.
https://t.co/kWvKdwIiOm
In SF, never ask why your friend is late to lunch or dinner.
There’s only one reason:
they were fighting for their life writing a prompt so Claude Code/Codex could run for 1+ hour without them.
“Reading after a certain age diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theater is tempted to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.” — Albert Einstein
@nasqret Still prefer the vscode extension. The price is lack of realtime collaboration but being able to run code and write paper in one place is priceless. On top you can use claude simultaneously.
Universities are still policing AI like it's a plagiarism problem.
Meanwhile, the gap is widening.
The researchers who figure out AI isn't for writing papers, know it's for accelerating research, filling knowledge gaps, handling the grunt work that blocks breakthrough thinking. They're already pulling ahead.
By the time your institution finalizes its "AI detection policy," those researchers will have published twice as much, explored ideas you're still stuck researching manually, and freed up mental space for the work that actually matters.
You can spend your energy hiding AI use, or you can spend it mastering AI as leverage.
One of those paths leads somewhere.