20260628
#219
“Cognitive debt is where you forgo the thinking in order just to get the answers, but have no real idea of why the answers are what they are.” — John Willshire, Smithery
“Whereas in the past humans struggled against exploitation, in the future the biggest struggle will be against uselessness — and it will be much worse to be useless than to be exploited.” — Yuval Noah Harari, via Umanz
People: “The AI economy promises profits without career paths“ — Cottom on girl-boss AI gaslighting and the pyramid with no middle. Mattering. Cognitive debt — “all the holes in your business where the humans would have been”. Developer deformation. Make some tea.
AI: Anthropic reports AI now writes 80% of its code — 8x developer output since 2024. Coding agents yield 17x more volume across firms. Mythos.
Karpathy knowledge management w/ LLMs.
AI strat: Labs move from bundles to metered pricing for coding tools, one user racked up 130B tokens in a month. Uber caps at $1,500/developer/month. CPM→CPC: the internet advertising precedent.
SysML, and SYSMOD creation with Claude #MBSE.
Foresight: Co-Existence. Book website now has a page written for AI agents. Have books come to an end?
Anthropic calls for the option to pause frontier development if recursive self-improvement takes hold.
Swiss capped at 10 million people?
Fables from the future.
Security: Beaufort castle: “every invading army since the Crusades has seized, held, and lost it” — now in the age of drones.
& DIY: Tracking V2X with ESP32. Lightning sensors.Random: Deep sea exploring. PNT. Funny sea hares - they cut their own heads and survive it.
The Holes Under the Building
Neville had not written a line of code himself in eleven months, and he had never been more productive.
The quarterly metrics said so. His team lead said so. The dashboard said so in a cheerful green font that Neville had spent six minutes asking an AI to design, and then another four asking it to make slightly less cheerful. He was, by every available measure, eight times the engineer he had been a year ago. He had told his mother this at Christmas and she had asked if he was eating.
The trouble began on a Tuesday, as trouble usually did. A junior colleague named Harriet asked him to explain a function he had shipped the previous week. Neville looked at the code. He recognised it in the way you recognise a street you have been driven down many times but have never walked.^1
“The AI wrote it,” he said.
“Yes,” said Harriet, “but you submitted it.”
Neville had a feeling there was something important in the gap between those two sentences, like a word you know exists but cannot quite retrieve. He stared at the function. It was correct. It was elegant. It solved the problem he had described in a prompt that had taken him forty seconds to compose. He had no idea why it worked.
Tim from Finance arrived at this moment to announce that the team’s agentic coding allocation for the month had hit 94% by the 9th. He said this in the tone of a man who had discovered something alive inside the photocopier.^2 Neville’s team had, by conservative estimate, consumed enough tokens to write the complete works of Balzac seventeen times over, in exchange for which they had produced software that the company would use and nobody would understand.
“What do you do when you don’t use the AI?” Harriet asked him that afternoon. She was the sort of person who kept a notebook — a paper one, with a pen — and who sometimes spent eight minutes staring at a blank page before writing anything. Neville had always found this suspicious.
“I use the AI,” he said.
She nodded slowly, as if confirming a hypothesis. She had recently been reading about a Japanese clothing manufacturer who had kept antique knitting machines running purely because the fabric they produced was, by some textile argument Neville could not follow, better. The machines were very slow. The sweaters cost four hundred pounds. There was a waiting list.^3
Neville went home and tried to write a function himself, just to see. It took him forty minutes to produce something he would previously have written in four. The shape of the thing was wrong in ways he felt but could not name, the way a chord can be almost right without being right. He looked at it for a long time.
He did not delete it.
The next morning he arrived early and fixed the original function — the one Harriet had asked about — without asking the AI anything. It took two hours. He felt, when he had finished, a kind of exhaustion that was adjacent to satisfaction, which he had not felt in almost a year, and which he had not known he was missing because the dashboard had been so cheerfully green.
He wrote to his mother. He said he was eating fine. She asked if he was sleeping.
He said he was learning.
^1 The IT department later described the function as “correct but inscrutable” — a phrase that also appears on at least three pieces of public art Neville had walked past without stopping.
^2 Tim subsequently discovered that the photocopier problem was unrelated. It was a sandwich. He did not disclose this.
^3 Harriet had not bought one. She was making something instead, on a pair of old needles, which was taking much longer than she had planned and was turning out slightly wider than intended, which she found she did not mind.