Shifting structures in a software world dominated by AI. Some first-order reflections (TL;DR at the end):
Reducing software supply chains, the return of software monoliths – When rewriting code and understanding large foreign codebases becomes cheap, the incentive to rely on deep dependency trees collapses. Writing from scratch ¹ or extracting the relevant parts from another library is far easier when you can simply ask a code agent to handle it, rather than spending countless nights diving into an unfamiliar codebase. The reasons to reduce dependencies are compelling: a smaller attack surface for supply chain threats, smaller packaged software, improved performance, and faster boot times. By leveraging the tireless stamina of LLMs, the dream of coding an entire app from bare-metal considerations all the way up is becoming realistic.
End of the Lindy effect – The Lindy effect holds that things which have been around for a long time are there for good reason and will likely continue to persist. It's related to Chesterton's fence: before removing something, you should first understand why it exists, which means removal always carries a cost. But in a world where software can be developed from first principles and understood by a tireless agent, this logic weakens. Older codebases can be explored at will; long-standing software can be replaced with far less friction. A codebase can be fully rewritten in a new language. ² Legacy software can be carefully studied and updated in situations where humans would have given up long ago.
The catch: unknown unknowns remain unknown. The true extent of AI's impact will hinge on whether complete coverage of testing, edge cases, and formal verification is achievable. In an AI-dominated world, formal verification isn't optional—it's essential.
The case for strongly typed languages – Historically, programming language adoption has been driven largely by human psychology and social dynamics. A language's success depended on a mix of factors: individual considerations like being easy to learn and simple to write correctly; community effects like how active and welcoming a community was, which in turn shaped how fast its ecosystem would grow; and fundamental properties like provable correctness, formal verification, and striking the right balance between dynamic and static checks—between the freedom to write anything and the discipline of guarding against edge cases and attacks. As the human factor diminishes, these dynamics will shift. Less dependence on human psychology will favor strongly typed, formally verifiable and/or high performance languages.³ These are often harder for humans to learn, but they're far better suited to LLMs, which thrive on formal verification and reinforcement learning environments. Expect this to reshape which languages dominate.
Economic restructuring of open source – For decades, open-source communities have been built around humans finding connection through writing, learning, and using code together. In a world where most code is written—and perhaps more importantly, read—by machines, these incentives will start to break down.⁴ Communities of AIs building libraries and codebases together will likely emerge as a replacement, but such communities will lack the fundamentally human motivations that have driven open source until now. If the future of open-source development becomes largely devoid of humans, alignment of AI models won't just matter—it will be decisive.
The future of new languages – Will AI agents face the same tradeoffs we do when developing or adopting new programming languages? Expressiveness vs. simplicity, safety vs. control, performance vs. abstraction, compile time vs. runtime, explicitness vs. conciseness. It's unclear that they will. In the long term, the reasons to create a new programming language will likely diverge significantly from the human-driven motivations of the past. There may well be an optimal programming language for LLMs—and there's no reason to assume it will resemble the ones humans have converged on.
TL; DR:
- Monoliths return – cheap rewriting kills dependency trees; smaller attack surface, better performance, bare-metal becomes realistic
- Lindy effect weakens – legacy code loses its moat, but unknown unknowns persist; formal verification becomes essential
- Strongly typed languages rise – human psychology mattered for adoption; now formal verification and RL environments favor types over ergonomics
- Open source restructures – human connection drove the community; AI-written/read code breaks those incentives; alignment becomes decisive
- New languages diverge – AI may not share our tradeoffs; optimal LLM programming languages may look nothing like what humans converged on
¹ https://t.co/0gO5TUwguU
² https://t.co/oN0PnPr1dF
³ https://t.co/nWKSw0m2Ct
⁴ https://t.co/ZrH3fhzQD4
“Very unlike me, I just finished listening to the 90+ minute recorded call between Sandra and Chike, and I noticed the tollowing:
Sandra never said Frank did anything wrong to her. Throughout the entire call, she never accused him of che@ting on her. Clearly, the chfating allegations she is now making appear to be an afterthought and mere propaganda.
She acknowledged in the call that she is the che@ter. Very clearly and unmistakably stated.
In fact, on more than two occasions, she admitted that it was not Frank's fault. She also acknowledged that he had every right to be angry.
Frank was willing to forgive her if she could stop talking to Chike - something she herself admitted would be difficult, even asking Chike whether he could do without her.
When the news first broke on social media, Frank even posted a picture of the two of them together in an attempt to manage the damage. The man genuinely wanted the relationship to work. He was prepared to forgive.
The so-called "malice" from Frank only began after he obtained evidence that Sandra was chfating on him. It was at that point that he started withdrawing and keeping to himself.
So, is anyone expecting a man who has raw evidence of his wife having sexual affairs with another man to be hugging the woman? I just don't understand what's going before our eyes.
Remember, this was a secretly recorded conversation, so it was as raw and genuine as it could possibly be.
Now tell me again — what exactly was Frank's offence?
My brother, I genuinely pity young people today. Things have deteriorated badly. I honestly fear for what marriage will look like in the next 15 years. At this rate, it may well be heading towards extinction.
—Bernard Obimma
“The price Nigerian influencers charge for content isn’t sustainable. Imagine wanting to patronize Sydney Talker and he tells you to pay ₦20 million for just one video. Shank tells me ₦12 million. I paid Ola of Lagos since last year till now and he still hasn’t fulfilled his contract; he’s still owing me six videos. Carter Efe is also still owing me three videos.”
— Fekomi states the reason he stopped using Nigerian influencers to promote his products.
Stop sexualising men
Stop sexualising men
Stop sexualising men
Stop sexualising men
Whatever I decide to wear is none of your business.
Eww.....women disgust me fr🤢🤮
@AsakyGRN A man and woman can be friends, however nowhere does that eliminate sexual nor romantic feelings no matter how much each other tries to hide them. I've never understood why this is even a subject to debate. Guys know a man's intentions and a woman knows a woman's intentions.
This lady argued that men and women can be just friends without catching feelings. So a guy told her to prove it by calling one of her male friends. She called her 9-year male bestie and asked him out on a romantic date and this was his response. Dey play�
8:15pm - The NWS is warning of the possibility of baseball sized hail and winds in excess of 80MPH with the storm currently moving towards far NW Parker County and Wise County. Residents in the Poolville, Perrin, Runaway Bay, Paradise, and Bridgeport should prepare for an intense thunderstorm.
“What is the Cityboy movement really about? Can these men openly seek votes in the South East? Without rigg!ng, they can’t win there, it seems they’re only enriching themselves”
– Morris
https://t.co/H9Lnh9vtkQ
One thing people still don’t clock about Wizkid…
He doesn’t have a “sound.”
He has a history.
There’s a Wizkid for:
• noisy Lagos streets
• campus parties
• heartbreak nights
• quiet global mornings
• grown-man peace
And all of them are real.
That’s why arguments about “old Wizkid vs new Wizkid” never make sense.
They’re all Wizkid.
Holla at Your Boy wasn’t pretending.
Ojuelegba wasn’t a phase.
Essence wasn’t luck.
Morayo isn’t boredom.
It’s one artist aging in public without losing himself.
Most artists freeze in one version of themselves.
Wizkid kept moving - calmly.
That’s why:
• his old songs still slap
• his new songs don’t feel forced
• his silence never feels scary
You’re not listening to hits.
You’re listening to chapters.
And that’s why his catalog feels alive.
Different eras.
Different moods.
Same soul.
🦅✨
On 8 April 1911, in a cold lab at Leiden, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and his team were measuring the electrical resistance of mercury as they cooled it with liquid helium to just a few kelvin above absolute zero. Up to that point, the “safe” expectation was that resistance would keep dropping smoothly as things got colder. Instead, the resistance didn’t just become small — it collapsed abruptly to something effectively indistinguishable from zero at a specific temperature (what we now call the critical temperature, about 4.2 K for mercury). What makes the moment feel almost surreal is how casually it was captured: Onnes’s lab notebook reportedly notes it in plain Dutch, essentially “mercury nearly zero” (“Kwik nagenoeg nul”).
That tiny line marks the birth of superconductivity: not a gradual improvement of conductivity, but a phase transition into a new state of matter where current can flow without measurable loss—an observation that later forced physicists to rethink how electrons behave collectively in solids.
you're describing "Pascal’s Wager for Happiness."
mathematically, the pessimist pays the "suffering tax" twice.
once during the anticipation of the bad event, and again when the bad event actually happens.
the optimist only pays the tax once (when the event happens).
if the bad event doesn't happen, the pessimist suffered for nothing, while the optimist enjoyed the ride.
New Years Resolutions:
- Run 7-10 miles every week and increase lung function
- Release an awesome book into the world
- Spend less time on social media ;) and more time writing for Substack
5 years ago today, Starlink connected our first paying customer with high-speed, low-latency internet from space.
Today, Wendy and Sean are joined by over 7M people across 150 countries, territories and markets staying connected with Starlink. Thank you to all of our customers.