mergesort

If I had to assign a confidence score for whether agents will change the way we all work and many aspects of how we live, I would put it at a 7/10, maybe 8/10. I felt about the same about the smartphone. While many things we do look the same way they did in 2005 (we still drive on roads, kids still go to school), at the same time it's undeniable that much of our lives are intermediated through a small screen and many societal dynamics have shifted due to that technology's existence.

I will concede that you should read my post with that context and draw your own conclusions about the veracity of my perspective — but I think it is more well-reasoned than what people generally attribute to "LLM hype". (Of course it's a bit tautological that I believe that, but I try to surround myself with people of all kinds technical and non-technical and like to think I stay reasonably grounded.)

All that said, I think the code from a leading company being bad and yet delivering good results is more a sign of the technology's jagged frontier[^1]. Calculators can't write sonnets the same way that LLMs are bad at math, but that doesn't make them useless — it just makes them a tool. This is a tool in our tool belt and I find is surprisingly useful as a general purpose technology despite it's limitations. (Which is related to the main argument I make in the post that bad code leading to good results may imply that we're under and overweighting certain aspects of what is important in software development, and that our expectations of code may may need to be recalibrated often as we gather more evidence.)

- I've had an iPhone for half my life (I'm 36 and got one when I was 19), so I've gotten pretty acclimated to typing on the go. I try switching to dictation every couple of months but the iPhone's dictation trips up over enough words that I find it more frustrating than typing as I walk.

- I don't do this but if you're worried about the thoughts disappearing I would absolutely recommend recording a voice note. As I'll touch on in a moment — do not let those thoughts disappear! Even the act of codifying them into something tangible allows you to process them more deeply.

- I live in NYC but I start most mornings by taking a walk along a relatively quiet street, so I rarely end up having to worry about bumping into someone. That is definitely not universally applicable advice. (:

- I look up as I'm typing and let autocorrect take the wheel. That works at least 95% of the time, so if I make the occasional typo it doesn't really matter, I'll just fix it in post.

I generally think this will be a very important technology so I teach the subject to make sure people understand how to use it as leverage in their lives. (Yes as paid workshops, but I also volunteer weekly for 3-4 hour sessions at a non-profit where I get nothing more than the joy of helping people learn a valuable skill.)

At the same time just last week I wrote a post decrying the slop people are hoisting on their coworkers[^1], because I want people to use this technology in a positive way to create the lives they want, not to create downstream consequences for others. Ultimately I think agentic systems are incredibly powerful but also a technology that lends itself to anti-social behavior because of how independently empowering it can be. And so I hope that with the right exposure, discussion, and teaching we can take advantage of its democratizing nature, while reinforcing that what makes us special as humans is that we care and coordinate to do greater things. Value in this world — not just in the financial sense that we often boil it down to when we talk about this subject.

Hope that context helps provide a better lens into the piece, and that I still do care a lot about code and everything else that got me here, but that you are also reading personal reflections of who I am in a time of change, which is making me question (or reinforcing) some of the fundamental things I believed about software and sometimes the world more widely.

> I’ve had to question the value of code a lot over the last couple of years, and this leak continues to reinforce the notion that I’ve vastly overestimated it my entire career.