Neil Traft

In the last few months, I've spoken to many CS professors who asked me if we even need CS PhD students anymore. Now that we have coding agents, can't professors work directly with agents? My view is that equipping PhD students with coding agents will allow them to do work that is orders of magnitude more impressive than they otherwise could. And they can be *accountable* for their outcomes in a way agents can't (yet). For example, who checks the agent's outputs are correct? Who is responsible for mistakes or errors?

That one neuron connects to about 7,000 others. Your brain has 86 billion of them. Do the math and you get somewhere around 100 trillion connections inside your head. More connections than stars in 1,500 galaxies. And each connection point is way more complicated than anyone expected. A Stanford lab found that every single connection contains about 1,000 tiny switches that can store memories and process information at the same time. So your brain is running roughly 100 quadrillion switches right now, while you read this sentence. The wild part is the power bill. Your brain runs on 20 watts. That’s less energy than the light in your fridge. The world’s fastest supercomputer needs 20 million watts to do the same amount of raw calculation. A million times more power for the same output. We’re still nowhere close to understanding how any of this works. In October 2024, a team of hundreds of scientists finished mapping every single connection in a fruit fly’s brain. Took six years and heavy AI help. That fly brain had 140,000 neurons. Yours has 86 billion. Google and Harvard also mapped a piece of human brain last year, a speck smaller than a grain of rice. That speck alone contained 150 million connections and took 1,400 terabytes to store. The lead scientist said mapping a full human brain at that detail would produce as much data as the entire world generates in a year. A tiny worm had its 302 brain cells mapped back in 1986. Almost 40 years later, scientists still can’t fully explain how that worm’s brain keeps it alive. Your brain has 86 billion of those cells, each one wired to thousands of others, each wire packed with a thousand switches, all of it humming along on less power than a lightbulb.

I'm confused by the very premise of this question, though? My PhD students are not code robots I command to implement what I want. They are human beings I am mentoring to become independent researchers

Do people become more conservative as they age? If they were born between 1940 and 1954, the answer is clearly "yes." Among people born from 1955 to 1979, there's really been no change. For those born in 1980 or later, it looks they are becoming more liberal as they age.

You may have noticed some "holy $%@#" tweets on fly brain emulation. So is this a game-changer or a nothing-burger? Read on to find out...