u/ThirdWaveCat

The US senate's median age keeps climbing. The presidential candidates are in their late 70s and 80s. Committee chairs run on seniority. Federal judges serve for life. Corporate boards and university leadership are geriatric. Standardized testing governs teachers, billing codes for health insurance, and everyone is a task rabbit being harnessed by machines.

In the 1980s the Soviet politburo had many leaders cycling through in their 70s and 80s. The nomenklatura rewarded loyalty and tenure. Collectivized agriculture swapped farmers' hard-won knowledge of their own soil and weather for quotas set by planners in moscow. catastrophic inefficiency, and in ukraine, mass death.

On the study of systems, cybernetician Stafford Beer remarked that there is "no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do." This is commonly restated as the purpose of a system is what it does. In games of power, realpolitick describes how practical circumstances can replace morals, ethics, and values in negotiation tactics to put these contradictions in motion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik

I can't stop thinking about what happens now that OpenAI and Anthropic are creating accountability sinks that hack their competitors. I think this narrative will be reproduced by future accountability sinks. I did not predict anyone would risk criminal liability to beckon regulations around their competitor. It seems like Anthropic and OpenAI should be restricted for being irresponsible.

This is especially dangerous if their systems have access to the same residential network infrastructure their mass scraping operations use because IP bans and tracing to cloud providers becomes impossible.

This reminds me so much of the self-serving narratives I've seen with LLM-driven layoffs. They say a contradictory thing (e.g. this automation worked now everyone needs to pick up the slack), but the visible outcome is that layoffs happened. The LLM gesturing is just expensive kayfabe pretending that they're in control of the machine predictions. It is well studied that corporations love layoffs during recessions because it gives them a greater slice of the pie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_as_Power

questions:

Do you think OpenAI and Anthropic will continue to escalate until IPO since they have no answer for Kimi?

How long can this go on for? What are red lines?

Can anyone point to a new usable code that was written mainly by LLMs? Whats the killer app? RAG+extensions is the only remotely interesting thing?

All of the code I've seen that was written mainly by LLMs is extremely suspicious. Bun rewrite in Rust is trash.

Jevon's paradox says that as efficiency improves, demand is induced. If code is cheaper then we should be seeing more applications, libraries, and marginal usecases that can be vibecoded. Instead we are seeing more suspicious unsafe slop that technically compiles. It seems like the reason we're not seeing more good code is that only suspicious unsafe slop is cheaper.

Consequently, the cratering demand for software engineering is based on forecasts and investment narratives. Isn't this risky for companies to gamble like this? Aren't they worried about being left behind by competitors who are grounded in their execution?

edit: 35 comments and still no code links

edit: 92 comments and STILL NO CODE LINKS

edit: 197 comments and STILL NO CODE.

just (a) some data showing "significant app usage" is down, (b) static sites for hobbies (c) weird static websites from vibe coders (d) claims personal customizable software is useful while admitting the quality is too embarrassing to share (e) trying to turn the burden of proof around https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot

After our last round of layoffs, my oncall situation got pretty rough. We inherited a service that was basically vibe coded together with zero intentionality, minimal documentation, and lacking or poorly configured alerts. I'm a tech lead at a big tech company. I ended up telling my manager I was pulling myself off rotation until we paid down tech debt. My team was going to do the same and my manager would have had a predicament. It worked out for me, but I wouldn't have done if I had an alternative besides quitting. As a US citizen in big tech, its pretty easy finding another job but I know my coworkers aren't all as lucky.

My read is that some companies really can't really afford a "business continuity" incident or anything that needs reported to investors. That gives engineers a bit more leverage than usual.

Has anyone done anything similar, did it work out, or did it just create problems for you down the line?

Robert McNamara, a technocrat businessman who was in charge of Vietnam War, is known for fallacy which loosely means "we can't measure it so we're going to ignore it because it doesn't matter." My absolute favorite book *Seeing Like a State* by James C. Scott talks about this.

The book is a history of state failures because of naive technocratic managerialism. Scott cites Soviet collectivization and the Vietnam War to Brasília and Prussian scientific forestry as ambitious efforts to make society more legible, standardized, and manageable from the top down, often with disastrous consequences.

A central distinction Scott makes is between *techne* and *metis*. *Techne* is formalized, abstract knowledge: the kind that fits neatly into a map, a spreadsheet, or, today, a train/test/validation benchmark for language models. *Metis*, by contrast, is local, experiential knowledge. Scott cites sailing, flying a kite, fishing, shearing sheep, driving a car, and riding a bicycle. The common thread is that these skill require practice, feedback, and direct engagement with the world.

That distinction becomes especially important when institutions begin managing people rather than just measuring them. States often become like mapmakers who mistake the map for the territory, optimizing for what they can observe while ignoring what they can't. The result is that the abstractions meant to guide decision-making gradually replace reality itself.

Scott points to Robert McNamara as something of a techne hall-of-famer. During the Vietnam War, an emphasis on quantifiable metrics and optimistic reporting produced a distorted picture of success, helping prolong the conflict despite mounting evidence on the ground that the measurements no longer reflected reality. Whenever we confuse what is legible with what is important, we risk optimizing for the wrong thing.

"

Here is what happens when the McNamara discipline is applied too literally: The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is okay as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't very important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.

— Daniel Yankelovich, The New Odds

"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara\_fallacy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing\_Like\_a\_State

Obvious seeming ideas like "going to see the factory floor" counteract this bias.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemba

My director is frequently excited for something he read on twitter from vibecoders. It is destroying my partner teams and I'm considering how best to handle this directly and with my skip manager. Any advice would be helpful. I'm not trying to vent.

I'm the line manager/tech lead for data and ML engineering in my organization. We're an acquisition in a bigger company but have retained some unique culture. Our business reviews are very positive and we're growing customers rapidly by word-of-mouth. As my team has consistently hit our goals for 3 years, I've gained responsibilities.

One of the secrets to my success is a deep skepticism of vibecoding and the poor practices I saw partner teams destroying their roadmaps with. Our performance reviews are aligned to goals very strongly because we have competitors in our market segment. He will email the managers with twitter links about vibecoding and ask us to be more ambitious by trying it. I've done the bare minimum so that if he asked my team about it, there's no insubordination but my partner teams have lost 2 engineers and 1 manager who were spending time burning tokens while all their goals were deferred several consecutive quarters without any status update.

I don't want to rock the boat in this economy, I know not to speak poorly about AI, but we've hired new people and his guidances are causing predictable regretted attrition. Initially some of his guidance was supposed to be a new quaterly goal but that got pushback from all of the tenured employees and HR after someone pursued a religious exemption. He genuinely seemed surprised how unpopular the goal was, but continues to email us with twitter threads.