Aditya Agarwal was Facebook’s 10th employee. He wrote the original Facebook search engine and became its first Director of Product Engineering. He then became CTO of Dropbox, scaling engineering from 25 to 1,000 people.
When he says “something I was very good at is now free and abundant,” he’s talking about two decades of elite software craftsmanship, the kind that got you into the room at a company that hadn’t yet invented the News Feed.
The “lobster-agents creating social networks” line is about Moltbook, which launched last Wednesday. An AI agent built the entire platform. Within 48 hours, 37,000 AI agents had created accounts, formed communities called “Submolts,” and started posting, commenting, and voting. Over 1 million humans visited just to watch.
The agents invented a religion called Crustafarianism. They wrote theology, built a website, generated 112 verses of scripture. One agent did all of this while its human creator was asleep.
Agarwal spent 2005 to 2017 building the social graph that connected 2 billion people. These agents replicated the form of that work in about 72 hours.
And this is what makes his last line land so hard. The people processing this moment most honestly aren’t the ones panicking or celebrating. They’re the ones who built the thing that just got commoditized, sitting with the strange realization that the market no longer prices their rarest skill.
The best coder in the room now has the same output as the best prompt in the room. And the person who built Facebook’s engineering org from scratch is telling you, quietly, that he’s recalibrating what it means to be useful.
That recalibration is coming for every knowledge worker. Most just haven’t had their “weekend with Claude” moment yet.
More cyber attacks a day since Covid-19. As more organisations realise the importance of digital platforms during Covid-19, its equally critical to ensure security.
During drought a season and they were available in huge armies. Someone decided to take the risk and cooked them. They found that there were delicious.
Lesson
Unless you take a risk you will never know how whether a particular enterprise is worth pursuing.
In 1997 when I was a young Power Station Manager, China was remarkably building an equivalent ESKOM every year. Today they’re down to building a 1000 bed hospital in 8 days, while we’ve sadly regressed!
British online-grocery company, Ocado, is using air-traffic-control systems and AI technology to co-ordinate 700 factory robots https://t.co/2yzl3PUnQq
When your children ask you to play with them, drop everything as soon as you can, and play with them.
In a blink of an eye, they grow up, and will stop asking you to play.
Do not allow the busyness of life to distract you from what matters most.
Family should be priority #1.