dragonhound 🕊️

My big conclusion from this week: Introspection causes emotional disorders.

Imagine a place where people could communicate around one shared idea and that only attracted people interested in that one specific topic thus cutting down on unnecessary noise and voices irrelevant to the topic being discussed.

What are your initial impressions of Grok 4.20? Major upgrades are still landing every week.

Name a tool you've used for years and never paid for. I'll go first: GitHub.

Everyone is misreading this chart. At first glance it looks scary for Software Engineers. According to Anthropic’s data, 96% of software development tasks are exposed to being replaced by AI. That’s the highest of any profession. - Higher than finance. - Higher than legal. - Higher than management. If you stop reading there, the conclusion seems obvious: - Software Engineers are the first to be replaced. But look closer. Actual observed usage is only 32%. And more importantly, ask the second question: - Who is building the automation for every other industry? Software Engineers! AI does not eliminate software. It makes software dramatically cheaper to produce. And when something becomes cheaper to produce, demand explodes. This is the Jevons paradox of software. As developers become AI-augmented, they do not disappear. They build: - AI systems for finance - automation for legal workflows - decision engines for healthcare - optimization tools for logistics Every industry in that chart becomes programmable. Software Engineers may be the first profession heavily automated by AI. But they are also the ones automating the rest of the economy. And that is why software demand keeps rising. (thanks Peter Walker for making the radar chart a bar charts, much easier to read)

🚨BREAKING: If you've used ChatGPT for writing or brainstorming in the last 6 months, your creative ability may already be permanently damaged. A controlled experiment just proved the effect doesn't reverse when you stop using it. 3,302 creative ideas. 61 people. 30 days of tracking. Researchers split students into two groups. Half used ChatGPT for creative tasks. Half worked alone. For five days, the ChatGPT group outperformed on every metric. Higher scores. More ideas. Better output. AI was making them better. Then day 7. ChatGPT removed. Every creativity gain vanished overnight. Crashed to baseline. Zero lasting improvement. But that's not the bad part. ChatGPT users' ideas became increasingly identical to each other over time. Same content. Same structure. Same phrasing. The researchers called it homogenization. Everyone using ChatGPT started producing the same ideas wearing different clothes. When ChatGPT was removed, the creativity boost disappeared -- but the homogenization stayed. 30 days later, same result. Their creative range had been permanently compressed. Five days of use. Permanent damage 30 days later. A separate trial confirmed it. 120 students. 45-day surprise test. ChatGPT users scored 57.5%. Traditional learners scored 68.5%. AI reduces cognitive effort. Less effort means weaker encoding. Weaker encoding means less creative raw material. You're not renting a productivity boost. You're financing it with your originality. The interest rate is permanent.