Jimmy Choca

Cofounder of the Helo email service ( Previously worked on Postmark (pre-acquisition) and in the payments industry.

[Jimmy Choca @james21896]

@wangzhr4 @mpasternak79 that wasn't what you said tho. excel has not been replaced by python. most non-coder corporate employees are still using it.

[Jimmy Choca @james21896]

@CFDevelop how does the average person benefit from AI? in their eyes they only stand to be harmed by it.

[Jimmy Choca @james21896]

@microDesignn crazy how fast jev went from the only thing on Twitter to old news

[Jimmy Choca @james21896]

@jessievbreugel https://t.co/IAZ0FQ7P0C 🙂

[Jimmy Choca @james21896]

@PawelJLisowski https://t.co/8gVDAdQM1x

[Jimmy Choca @james21896]

@voidmode yea coding with ai just isn't as interesting or fulfilling most of the time -- no flow to be had. it's also all instant gratification, like the coding equivalent of watching tiktok all day or something.

[Jimmy Choca @james21896]

@akilrajpari @EdemDevletEN nuance is not rewarded on X unfortunately

[Jimmy Choca @james21896]

- Many average people probably underestimate what AI can do, but a lot of power users overestimate what it can do.
- Even with coding, AI can write code that is often technically correct but does not represent good engineering judgment (just look at any purely vibe coded, non-trivial codebase). Imagine what code would look like if you never steered the AI and just let it do whatever.
- As mentioned AI can be trusted to do tasks that are easily verifiable. I personally wouldn't trust it to do much else.
- Automating tasks isn't the same as automating jobs. Every job has a certain amount of tribal/contextual knowledge that AI doesn't have. Replacing a lot of jobs with AI will effectively eliminate the expertise that makes those activities valuable.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel.

- Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all.
- Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract.
- Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code.
- And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while.

The funnel is driven by a combination of factors:
1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel.
2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel.
3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal.

So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.

[Jimmy Choca @james21896]

@shl there is no one not talking about moats

[Jimmy Choca @james21896]

@Saadeghi https://t.co/DpArXAtD3F

[Jimmy Choca @james21896]

Software? Dead.
SaaS? Dust.
Software engineering? Donezo.
Moats? A thing of the past.
Competing on features? Deceased.
X? Replaced.
Slack? Caput.
MailChimp? Fucked.
Reading code? No more.
Writing code? HAH.
Software jobs? Gone.

Hyperbole, hot takes, and unpopular opinions tho.

[Jimmy Choca @james21896]

@bryan_king @Saadeghi @levelsio 2 broccoli florets for health

[Jimmy Choca @james21896]

@AladinKumar1 @shanebarakat agents may produce code that is technically correct, but it may not represent good engineering practices

[Jimmy Choca @james21896]

Software? Dead.
SaaS? Dust.
Software engineering? Donezo.
Moats? A thing of the past.
Competing on features? Deceased.
X? Replaced.
Slack? Caput.
MailChimp? Fucked.
Reading code? No more.
Writing code? HAH.
Software jobs? Gone.

Hyperbole, hot takes, and unpopular opinions tho.

[Jimmy Choca @james21896]

@VicNexAI find a new ESP 😜

[Jimmy Choca @james21896]

@mdnlabs you wouldn't, but someone could gain unauthorized access to your github. for example, say you're using CircleCI, which has credentials to access you github. CircleCI gets hacked. now what?

[Jimmy Choca @james21896]

@grubbygrubsters 💯

[Jimmy Choca @james21896]

@grubbygrubsters @shanebarakat true to an extent. what happens when there's an issue AI can't figure out? can a vibe coder dive in and do it themselves? even tho engineers may not always be reading the code, they can if they need to. even DHH admits he skims.

[Jimmy Choca @james21896]

@yongfook meanwhile in the real world ppl continue to pay for saas

[Jimmy Choca @james21896]

@SamVale29 i will never do another daily stand up. i refuse.