Three Predictions:
1. Some form of AI, probably neurosymbolic in nature, will come that is far more economical and data- and energy-efficient than LLMs, and it will make an absolute fortune.
2. LLMs, on the other hand, will never be all that profitable (aside from the chip companies selling shovels in the gold rush).
3. Today’s gigantic bets are premature, and most won’t pay off.
No one could have known that telling programmers "spend as much money as possible on this new agent technology; whoever spends the most money wins!" would result in companies spending too much money on this new technology.
Where others use AI to “create”, at TigerBeetle we’re more excited about how to use the machines to “destroy”.
Some see AI as a way to “type faster” or “increase productivity”, but at TigerBeetle I tell the team we’re already “too productive” (through TigerStyle), we want calm focused work not burnout… and we know that all the huge gains come from understanding anyway.
So “destruction” aka testing, i.e. as a foil or sparring training partner, is where we see it’s at with AI.
Not to create. That stays with the humans so we don’t atrophy our understanding, which is more valuable than “LOC”.
But to increase quality through defense in depth in testing. But even there, the gains with AI are marginal, a few percent, compared to the 90% power of our DST, which again, came from systems thinking.
So I encourage our team to “keep playing the violin yourself”, to keep practicing, keep training, keep investing in understanding.
Now I understand the full picture.
The cleanest fix is...
But actually, the real fix simpler...
Actually wait.
The best fix:
Now the real fix.
Actually, let me reconsider.
OK
Key finding:
Wait
I need a hardware device I can physically punch to stop the agentic session.
so... I audited Garry's website after he bragged about 37K LOC/day and a 72-day shipping streak.
here's what 78,400 lines of AI slop code actually looks like in production.
a single homepage load of https://t.co/TqaEZsF44N downloads 6.42 MB across 169 requests.
for a newsletter-blog-thingy.
1/9🧵
right now everything in the world is telling you to go faster, ship more, add that feature, start another project
so i'm actively working on feeling ok not doing any of that
Black Mirror S8E1: In 2027, developers are allocated a daily Claude token allowance by the government. A junior dev burns through his entire month's supply trying to centre a div. His family starve. He is forced to write the code himself. He can't. Society collapses.
@MoooSylla Because its easier to say "fuck everyone" and close it off than it is to write automation to combat this never before seen scale of retardation
Software engineers: Context switching kills productivity.
Also software engineers: I'm now managing 19 AI agents and doing 1800 commits a day.
We’ve spent years complaining that managers who expect a quick 5-minute chat ruin our focus for the next hour. But a ping from an agent every few minutes, that’s ok?
We celebrated Paul Graham’s essay “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” in which he argued:
“When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.”
Now we see software engineers claiming huge productivity gains from hordes of AI agents, celebrating thousands of commits per day from their 19 agents.
Either context switching was never really the problem, and we oversold our need for deep focus. Or we're not actually reviewing 1800 commits a day.
If we couldn't context switch before, we're not managing 19 agents. We're blindly trusting them.
That’s not engineering, it’s gambling.
oh come on. You think your grandma wants to make her own app? Much less maintain it.
Everyone neglects the mental energy it takes to even *think* of what it is exactly you want.
The entire principle of apps relies on some faith that designers; and the collective feedback of their users, can come up with a workflow or design paradigm that is *better* than what you; an individual could come up with.
This is true for 99% of cases.
I’d be floored if even 1% of global users want bespoke applications for uber-specific needs. Not saying it’s useless; but it’s so far away from what average users want.
everyone's talking about their teams like they were at the peak of efficiency and bottlenecked by ability to produce code
here's what things actually look like
- your org rarely has good ideas. ideas being expensive to implement was actually helping
- majority of workers have no reason to be super motivated, they want to do their 9-5 and get back to their life
- they're not using AI to be 10x more effective they're using it to churn out their tasks with less energy spend
- the 2 people on your team that actually tried are now flattened by the slop code everyone is producing, they will quit soon
- even when you produce work faster you're still bottlenecked by bureaucracy and the dozen other realities of shipping something real
- your CFO is like what do you mean each engineer now costs $2000 extra per month in LLM bills
Claude 4.6 Opus just refactored my entire codebase in one call.
25 tool invocations. 3,000+ new lines. 12 brand new files.
It modularized everything. Broke up monoliths. Cleaned up spaghetti.
None of it worked.
But boy was it beautiful.