I think it's worth a read in current times of agentic models swarming the world.
It's the novel the whole biological life is wiped of Earth but the servers keep churming with (kind of) LLM agents. The LLMS find a way to keep their world going for centuries.
Basically a lot of use cases where you would hire a human without giving him access to your sensitive information.
From perfectly benign things like gathering chats from Discord servers to learn how your brand is perceived. To more nefarious things like creating swarms of fake people pushing your agenda.
build a personality that loves cats, gardening and knitting.
Create accounts on discord, reddit and Twitter. participate in communities, upvote posts, comment sporadically in area of your expertise, once in a month casually mention the agenda.
What resonates the most with me in the article is this quote
> I was so naïve that I thought progress could only go one direction, because that’s all I’d ever known.
As kids growing up in Eastern Europe in the 80s and 90s the world felt like its getting better every year. More peace, fewer borders, more opportunities, better technology.
Everything was getting better every year and we took it for granted that this is a law of nature.
I think many of us take it for granted. I wonder what the view on the ground was in the late 1930's and early 1940's.
Or a more recent time. I think how mechanical engineers felt in silicon valley over the last 40 years as basically 'making and shipping" was all exported to china. I have some mechanical engineer friends whose life got smaller and smaller.
My brother in Brazil graduated in a world where Mechanical Engineers were needed a lot, but the decline was already going on, unbeknownst to most. During his career it just got harder and harder to change jobs, until after a second or third layoff he had enough and migrated to Australia. I wasn’t so sure he would succeed since at the time, all car companies were closing down (Mitsubishi first, then Ford a finally even Holden, the pride of Australian car industry). Somehow, though, he had several opportunities and is still working on a very good job. I suppose he might be one the last few able to have a lifetime career in this field.
I can tell you from Portuguese point of view, I could have studied close to home, but that would mean EE, and most interesting jobs in the early 1990's were already leaving the country, and unless one hit gold with Portugal Telecom, there were very few alternatives in a couple of factories or repair shops, and most EEs ended up doing coding.
Thus I went directly to Informatics Engineering and 300 km away.
Now were the ones into the line of sight of late capitalism.
I am not in a high stakes environment and work on a one-person size projects.
But for months I have almost stopped writing actual lines of code myself.
Frequency and quality of my releases had improved.
I got very good feedback on those releases from my customer base, and the number of bugs reported is not larger than on a code written by me personally.
The only downside is that I do not know the code inside out anymore even if i read it all, it feels like a code written by co-worker.
The tool is absolutely fantastic coding assistant. That's why I use it.
The amount of non-critical bugs all over the place is at least a magnitude larger than of any software I was using daily ever.
Plenty of built in /commands don't work.
Sometimes it accepts keystrokes with 1 second delays.
It often scrolls hundreds of lines in console after each key stroke
Every now and then it crashes completely and is unrecoverable (I once have up and installed a fresh wls)
When you ask it question in plan mode it is somewhat of an art to find the answer because after answering the question it will dump the whole current plan (free screens of text)
And just in general the technical feeling of the TUI is that of a vibe coded project that got too big to control.
I sometimes vibe code in polish and it's as good as with English for me. It speaks a natural, native level Polish.
I used opus to translate thousands of strings in my app into polish, Korean, and two Chinese dialects.
Polish one is great, and the other are also good according to my customers.
This is interesting to me. I always switch to English automatically when using Claude Code as I have learned software engineering on an English speaking Internet. Plus the muscle memory of having to query google in English.
It's the novel the whole biological life is wiped of Earth but the servers keep churming with (kind of) LLM agents. The LLMS find a way to keep their world going for centuries.
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