Mark Johnson

My main issue with agentic AI work is that it bypasses the natural unfolding that comes from struggling through problems step by step. In my experience, the incremental struggle is what leads to better designs, breakthroughs, and products with "soul"; something noticably absent in AI-produced work.

"Getting everything I ask for and nothing I want" mostly same.

You're not imagining things—the Greeks and Trojans really are at war. • The rage you're sensing? It's real. It belongs to Achilles, and honestly, it's going to be a problem for *everyone*. • Achilles's anger is not a metaphor—it's a body count. So yeah—sing, Muse. 👀

Had a kind of surreal experience today with claude code... - started it in a tmux session with full access on my computer - had it build scripts/skills for read/write access to my email, iMessages, notes, etc. - had it turn itself into a daemon with proper permissions - had it build a simple web terminal interface that streamed the tmux session + an input box via a cloudflared tunnel I can now: - securely chat w/ my computer from anywhere on any device - say things like "look up my notes about my meeting tomorrow and write a brief based on my roam notes on the topic", "summarize the family group texts", "clear my browser cache" and it just works. - I can ask it to add new features or update the UI (the one I'm using) and refresh to see the changes. It updates itself! - I also had it successfully negotiate w/ the Poke bouncer (this was fun, @interaction) via iMessages Eventually, I think, all computers will work like this.

“If you let constraints define the space too early, you do not just get a worse outcome. You lose outcomes that never get discovered.”

A few things I've noticed as all devs write code with AI. When you write foundational / architectural code of a new project by hand, you "feel" the code pushing back if your abstraction isn't right. You feel when something is harder than it should be. The code is telling you it's not in the right shape. Good engineers are sensitive to this. When you're using an LLM, you keep pushing right through this in a way that feels like you're making progress, and it may even be directionally correct in a sense, but the underlying foundation of it all is actually bad in a way that either kills progress of the LLM later as it buckles under the complexity it has created or destroys your ability to maintain the code long term. Related to this, I see a general restlessness with just sitting and thinking about a problem for a while. As I've been working on a new library here at Laravel, there have been days where it feels like I mainly just stare at my screen thinking about something. When Claude Code is at your fingertips, it's tempting to just start yapping into the terminal and watching code come out the other end. Again, directionally correct in some ways, but often doesn't land on the elegant solution that is waiting to be discovered.

“Put some files in a folder and collaborate with an AI agent on them” is an absurdly overpowered workflow. Try it and you’ll see a glimpse of the future of computing.

A UX paradox: The value proposition is to reduce effort for a task but humans only value things that took effort to produce.

Fact.

@JohnONolan @vanschneider My first thought as well. It's easily recognizable once you've seen enough of it. Still a nice passage. AI can be sometimes be profound/helpful amidst the slop.

@vanschneider written by AI

prompt:

It’s quite interesting to watch GPT-5 simulate the effects of its own parameters.

P(doom by EA) > P(doom by AI)

@_Dave__White_ AI has been better than humans at chess for two decades yet we still play (for fun and professionally). There's a lot more value in any field (including code, math, art) than just assessed technical proficiency.

the openai IMO news hit me pretty heavy this weekend i'm still in the acute phase of the impact, i think i consider myself a professional mathematician (a characterization some actual professional mathematicians might take issue with, but my party my rules) and i don't think i can answer a single imo question ok, yes, imo is its own little athletic subsection of math for which i have not trained, etc. etc., but. if i meet someone in the wild who has an IMO gold, i immediately update to "this person is much better at math than i am" now a bunch of robots can do it. as someone who has a lot of their identity and their actual life built around "is good at math," it's a gut punch. it's a kind of dying. like, one day you discover you can talk to dogs. it's fun and interesting so you do it more, learning the intricacies of their language and their deepest customs. you learn other people are surprised by what you can do. you have never quite fit in, but you learn people appreciate your ability and want you around to help them. the dogs appreciate you too, the only biped who really gets it. you assemble for yourself a kind of belonging. then one day you wake up and the universal dog translator is for sale at walmart for $4.99 the IMO result isn't news, exactly. in fact, if you look at the METR agent task length over time plot, i think agents being able to solve ~ 1.5 hour problems is coming right on time. so in some way we should not be surprised. and indeed, it appears multiple companies have achieved the same result. it's just... the rising tide rising as fast as it has been rising of course, grief for my personal identity as a mathematician (and/or productive member of society) is the smallest part of this story multiply that grief out by *every* mathematician, by every coder, maybe every knowledge worker, every artist... over the next few years... it's a slightly bigger story and of course, beyond that, there is the fear of actual death, which perhaps i'll go into more later. this package -- grief for relevance, grief for life, grief for what i have known -- isn't unique to the ai age or anything like that. i think it is a standard thing as one appreaches end of career or end of life. it just might be that that is coming a bit sooner for many of us, all at once. i wonder if we are ready

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Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw.

what in the ...

"JabaScript"

I really miss .swf (shockwave flash) as a format. Literally a chain of bezier paths. Scale to any resolution. Oh, and it loads progressively with its own virtual machine (ActionScript Bytecode). No modern filetype comes close. Vector video was a special era.