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sit your ass down and read
we've all been building, shipping, doing an insane amount of stuff recently with ai tooling and agents offloading the work. the thing that got me thinking is what keeps this cycle going. the way i see it is that we as humans are hardcoded to "work and see a visible result," and the relationship between us and the thing we're working on is getting thinner by the day.
when we wrote a function at 2am, line by line (lol that sounds like ages ago), the work and the mental model of it were the same object. now with agents doing the work, the stuff exists and the mental model exists separately. so building survives, but it bifurcates.
How i see this bifurcation is three category of it:
at the top are the people shaping the substrate itself, the ones building the models, designing the agent arch , setting the patterns of how everyone else builds inside it. they're upstream of everyone, including the deep makers.
below them are the deep makers, people who use agents but read carefully enough to understand and own everything they ship. this is the version of the maker identity that survives the transition, operating at much higher throughput because they're using agents as leverage on a real foundation. this is also where "vibecoding" actually adds the most value, which sounds wrong, because it is usually code for slop but that done from this foundation is the highest leverage mode in the new regime. you're stacking agent throughput on top of real comprehension.
below them are the surface makers, people who ship things but don't read what they ship. they're functionally orchestrating a process whose substance they don't grasp. from the outside indistinguishable from deep makers, from the inside hollow.
below them are the pure consumers, downstream of everyone above, using the products, scrolling the feeds, not engaging with the production of anything numerically the biggest group, and probably growing with the trends.
one thing worth noticing is that the real chasm in this stack isn't where it looks.
It isn't symmetric imo:
So substrate shapers and deep makers are doing the same cognitive thing at different scales, both engaging deeply with substance, surface makers and pure consumers are also doing the same cognitive thing at different scales, both accepting outputs they didn't shape. the actual fault line is between tier two and tier three. between people who engage with substance and people who don't, regardless of how many "repos" they ship.
a surface maker pushing a hundred repos a year is closer, in the way that matters, to the consumer scrolling twitter than to the deep maker pushing the same hundred repos.
so what keeps you going upward in this stack?
simple. it's reading. and by reading i don't just mean books. i mean close engagement with substance in whatever form it shows up in front of you. the code the agent produced. its reasoning. the user feedback. the underlying paper. the system logs. the production action.
all of it, with the willingness to slow down on any of it and actually understanding.
reading is the one thing that determines whether you slide down the gradient or hold position and move above. without the reading habit, even today's deep makers drift toward surface making within a few years, because the path of least resistance with these tools is to accept the output and ship.
So from where i see the gradient pulls everyone downward by default. reading and understating is the only upward force that counteracts the pull.
both directions compound
reading produces taste, taste lets you direct agents more precisely. precision produces better results. better results give you sharper material to read your own work against. that's the upward loop.
surface making produces results that just barely work, which trains you that you don't need to read deeply, which produces more results that just barely work. that's the downward loop.
both are gentle quarter to quarter, both are invisible in any single decision, both are devastating across years. which means the small move that feels low stakes ("i'll just accept this pr, it looks fine") is actually a vote for which loop takes root in your habits.
we move up and down this gradient based on what we cultivate. the slowing down. the sitting your ass down and engaging with what's actually in front of you. that's not just a way to stay a maker. it's the one way to keep "agency" in a world that's optimised to take it from you quietly.
Though the debate for the auth of the results that the agents are producing is still debatable, but that comes next, You at least need to see and tell what is happening and how it is, To even survive.
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