Alex Gilliland

your only goal should be to believe in something before many other ppl do, one time for each parts of you life. that’s the only skill that matters if you want to escape orbit. e.g. you have to believe in a person before others do (your wife), you have to believe in whatever you're working on or even where you're working before the rest of zietgiest does (like everyone wants to work at the labs right now, that will make it difficult), & you have to find a city/neighborhood that you can afford but still has upside/potential for a house etc. developing asymmetric skillsets like these is more important now than ever before cuz the market liquidity in every area is limitless & the competition is global.

someone yesterday asked me what i thought high agency meant. i think it’s usually some unholy combination of: - resourcefulness - relentlessness - resilience this has always been rare, but rn it feels borderline unfair. the world has never had more leverage just sitting around waiting for one person stubborn enough to use it.

For everything we’ve seen about agents so far, it’s clear that they will make it far easier for people to get into previously extremely complicated fields. That will most certainly mean far more people will build software, explore creative work, research spaces they couldn’t do before, and so on. Yet, equally, we’ve seen that people with experience in every one of those fields have a huge edge with the right judgment and historical context to leverage these tools in ways that exceed the output of the novices (if they choose to). They know when the agents are making catastrophic mistakes, can give the agents the right context to do the job better than they otherwise would have, and so on. The combination of these two facts essentially means that we will continue to get the same lift as we’ve seen in any other technological revolution. More democratization, but similarly greater output from the experts. This then makes the experts continue to be in higher demand because over time our expectation for what we can get out of any field will just go up. This is going to be true in essentially every important field. You’ll trust a lawyer using an agent for legal advice over someone who’s never had to experience how well a contract holds up. You’ll trust an engineer developing and running software over someone who’s never seen a production system. You’ll rely on the important instincts of a designer using agents over the average prompter. The quality and volume of output we expect from these functions will certainly go up meaningfully, but the person with experience will always have a leg up, which is why the jobs don’t go away.

winners over the next decade are going to be schizo, tech individuals who know how to navigate machines and get the work done as soon as possible. at the same time, understanding what it means to be human. talk to people, hold eye contact, read the room, and think for themselves