Arie Jones
21.8K posts
@programmersedge
Master of the Le'sigh Side @TelcoinTAO - Platform Council Owner\Vice President at Indy Data Partners, Inc. and some others
Jensen Huang: "If that $500,000 engineer did not consume at least $250,000 worth of tokens, I am going to be deeply alarmed. This is no different than a chip designer who says 'I'm just going to use paper and pencil. I don't think I'm going to need any CAD tools.'"
My cousin Dietrich is one of the best paid engineers in Germany He makes €41,000 a year before tax Last week he got an offer from a big tech company in the US that would net him $350,000 "Are you going to take it?" I asked him "It's a good offer, but I would actually earn less than now" He is right. In Europe, he makes €41,000 and gets: - Free healthcare - Strong privacy protections - Diversity - Pension benefits If you count this in, it's much more than $350,000 European salaries are the highest in the world if you adjust for quality of life
im fully convinced that LLMs are not an actual net productivity boost (today) they remove the barrier to get started, but they create increasingly complex software which does not appear to be maintainable so far, in my situations, they appear to slow down long term velocity
im fully convinced that LLMs are not an actual net productivity boost (today) they remove the barrier to get started, but they create increasingly complex software which does not appear to be maintainable so far, in my situations, they appear to slow down long term velocity
I've been having such an amazing time with Claude Code I wanted you to be able to have my *exact* skill setup: Introducing gstack, which you can install just by pasting a short piece of text into your Claude code
OK, related to this: Fresh data from Uber, from Feb 2026: 31% of code is AI-authored 11% of PRs opened by agents And Uber is investing heavily in AI So outside Anthropic + AI labs, we are a far way out, probably? Source: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-uber-use…
Exactly one year ago (10 mar 2025), Dario Amodei: "I think we will be there in 3-6 months, where AI is writing 90% of the code. And then, in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code." This turned out to be... too darn accurate.
It is time for physicists to shine. We write messy, duct-tapey code glued together that kind of works. We are not natural engineers but more driven by curiosity. Coding agents are god send for people like us. We don’t have to worry about the stupid shit any more. Physicists are good at understanding complex systems and essentially that is what software engineering will evolve to. In the next 10 years, software purists will slowly lose their minds as the messy clunky coders who prefer velocity will start shipping production grade code better than what the purists can deliver today. I have to admit; it is oddly satisfying to see purists losing it. And I am not just talking about software.
What if a codebase was actually stored in Postgres and agents directly modified files by reading/writing to the DB? Code velocity has increased 3-5x. This will undoubtedly continue. PR review has already become a bottleneck for high output teams. Codebase checked-out on filesystem seems like a terrible primitive when you have 10-100-1000 agents writing code. Code is now high velocity data and should be modeled at such. Bare minimum, we need write-level atomicity and better coordination across agents, better synchronization primitives for subscribing to codebase state changes and real-time time file-level code lint/fmt/review. The current ~20 year old paradigm of git checkout/branch/push/pr/review/rebase ended Jan 2026. We need an entirely new foundational system for writing code if we’re really going to keep pace with scale laws.
My take: Wise investors should pull out of data centres now. It's impossible to reach AGI & exponential AI growth through increasing the scale of compute. LLMs have already hit their developmental plateau. There will never be a return on that +$500 billion investment.
.@USWREMichael says the Maduro raid was the trigger point for the DoW’s conflict with Anthropic: “Palantir’s the prime contractor. [Anthropic] is the sub.” “One of [Anthropic’s] execs called Palantir and asked, ‘Was our software used in that raid?’” “So— they’re trying to get classified information. And implying— if they were used in that raid, that it might violate their terms of service.” “It raised enough alarm with Palantir, who has a trusted relationship with the Department, to tell me, and I’m like, ‘Holy shit— what if this software went down? Some guardrail kicked up? Some refusal happened for the next fight like this one and we left our people at risk?” “I went to @SecWar @PeteHegseth and told him what happened.” “That was like a ‘Woah’ moment for the whole leadership at the Pentagon that we’re potentially so dependent on a software provider without another alternative that has the right or ability to not only shut it off— maybe it’s a rogue developer who could poison the model to make it not do what you want, or trick you, or hallucinate purposefully.” “That culminated in the Tuesday dramatic meeting with Secretary Hegseth and me and Dario with the Friday deadline that got blown.” “I never really thought they wanted to make it.” @DoWCTO @emilmichael on @theallinpod
