The AI vampire

From the article:

Agentic software building is genuinely addictive. The better you get at it, the more you want to use it. It’s simultaneously satisfying, frustrating, and exhilarating. It doles out dopamine and adrenaline shots like they’re on a fire sale.

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And that’s where the problem gets into full swing. Because other people are listening!

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We’re all setting unrealistic standards for everyone else.

Maybe me worst of all. I have 40 years of experience, I’ve led large teams, I read fast, and I have essentially unlimited time, energy, and now tokens for experimenting. I am completely unrepresentative of the average developer.

But I’m still standing up and telling everyone “do it this way!” I even co-wrote a book about it.

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I don’t think there’s a damn thing we can do to stop the train. But we can certainly control the culture, since the culture is us. I plan to practice what I preach, and dial my hours back. That’s going to mean saying No to a lot of people who want to chat with me (sorry!), and also dialing back some of my ambitions, even if it means losing some footraces. I don’t care. I will fight the vampire.

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If you have joined an AI-native startup, the founders and investors are using the VC system to extract value from you, today, with the glimmer of hope for big returns for you all later.

Most of these ideas will fail.

I know this because they are literally telling me their plans like villains at the end of an old movie, since with Gas Town I have mastered the illusion of knowing what I’m doing. Truth is, nobody, least of all me, knows what they’re doing right now. But I look like I do, so everyone is coming to show me their almost uniformly terrible ideas.

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Enterprises see the oncoming horde and think, oh jeez, we need to hustle. And they’re not exactly wrong. Which means this lovely dystopian picture is making its way slowly but surely into enterprise, at the big company where you work.

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My friends who were grumbling back in 2001 needed some help with this, and I gave it to them. One day I walked up to the whiteboard during a particularly heated grumble-session, and I wrote a ratio on the board: $/hr (dollars divided by hours).

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I said to everyone, Amazon pays you a flat salary, no bonuses, and you work a certain number of hours per week. From that, you can calculate that you make a certain number of dollars per hour.

I told the grumbler group, you can’t control the numerator of this ratio. But you have significant control over the denominator. I pointed at the /hr for dramatic effect.

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As for my part, I went ahead and dialed that denominator down, and lived life a bit while I was at Amazon, because fuck extraction.

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That old formula is also my proposed solution for the AI Vampire, a quarter century later.

Someone else might control the numerator. But you control the denominator.

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You need to push back. You need to tell your CEO, your boss, your HR, your leadership, about the AI vampire. Point them at this post. Send them to me. I’m their age and can look them in the eye and be like yo. Don’t be a fool.

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I regret the unrealistic standards that I’m contributing to setting. I don’t believe most people can work like I’ve been working. I’m not sure how long I can work how I’ve been working.

I’m convinced that 3 to 4 hours is going to be the sweet spot for the new workday. Give people unlimited tokens, but only let people stare at reports and make decisions for short stretches. Assume that exhaustion is the norm. Building things with AI takes a lot of human energy.