The AI Vampire
by Gordon Weakliem
I haven’t been writing much, I’ve been busy with other stuff and haven’t felt the need for that outlet. But man, I’ve been feeling what Steve Yegge writes in The AI Vampire.
The world is accelerating, against its will.
It’s true, a lot of people have been expressing feelings of burnout. I work at a company that’s a 1 or 2 on Steve’s levels of AI adoption, but from my own usage I feel like I’m wrung dry. It’s hard to keep up with ideas when someone or something is implementing them so fast you can’t stay ahead of them. It’s an exercise in management and I haven’t gotten used to the pace. Indeed, he nails it with “AI has turned us all into Jeff Bezos, by automating the easy work, and leaving us with all the difficult decisions, summaries, and problem-solving.”
When Steve talks about $/hr, that one hits home. I’ve been saying for years that work is trading time for money, and it’s your responsibility to make a good trade. There are definitely capitalists out there that want to maximize their side of the equation and it’s your responsibility to push back. I got told early in my career that nobody has a gravestone that says “I wish I’d spent more time at work”, but the formulation of minimizing the denominator is a good way to look at it.
There are a lot of people who rightfully feel like there’s a moment where competition is wide open and certain established players are vulnerable. That played out a bit last week in the stock market, but that’s a very imperfect measure.
Cue nine thousand sandbox startups, all of which will eventually be killed off by a single OSS winner wrapped by home-grown internal vibe-coded SaaS.
I’m not convinced that will be the case. I’m starting to feel like there will be more companies building custom solutions for at least part of their business, and some might turn those into products, but I feel like these highly generalized solutions with a plugin architecture and endless configurability will be less appealing in the future.
One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot is the case of the Luddites in England. The modern word “luddite” refers to anti-technology, but the Luddites weren’t anti-tech per se, they were worried about its impact on labor. They had good reason to be, textile manufacture was one of the early adopters of abusive labor practices, unsafe conditions, and child labor. People are worried about mental health, financial, and environmental effects, but I think the most clear and present danger is the effect on labor.