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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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I'm afraid apps won't become lighter -- getting light is easy but there is little market incentive to, AGI programmer would rather create more dark patterns than

Still, I think we'll notice a big difference when you can just throw money at any coding problem to solve it. Right now, it's not like this. You might say "hiring a programmer" is the equivalent, but hiring is difficult, you're limited in how many people can work on a program at once, maintenance and tech debt becomes an issue. But when everyone can hire the "world's 175th best programmer" at once? It's just money. Would you rather donate to Mozilla foundation or spend an equivalent to close out every bug on the Firefox tracker?

How much would AMD pay to have tooling equivalent to CUDA magically appear for them?

Again, I think if AGI really hits, we'll notice. I'm betting that this ain't it. Realistically, what's actually happening is that people are about to finally discover that solving leetcode problems has very little relation to what we actually pay programmers to do. Which is why I'm not too concerned about my job despite all the breathless warnings.

But when everyone can hire the "world's 175th best programmer" at once?

When everyone can hire the _world's 175th best-at-quickly-solving-puzzles-with-code programmer at once. For quite significant cost. I think people would be better off spensing that amount of money on gemini + a long context window containing the entire code base + associated issue tracker issues + chat logs for most real-world programming tasks, because writing code to solve well-defined well-isolated problems isn't the hard part of programming.