Resources

People often ask me "How did you learn how to hack?" The answer: by reading. This page is a collection of the blog posts and other articles that I have accumulated over the years of my journey. Enjoy!

The main idea around the post is that people are using AI too much and are overworking. CEOs dream of this level of productivity but it's impossible to maintain 10x all the time.

While productivity increases, your salary doesn't with it. The employer captures 100% of the value of you using AI; you get nothing from it. This is why the post is called AI vampire. If you decide to only work 1 hour a day to offset this productivity bonus then you'll run out of a job because others are doing the 10x increase in productivity. So, what's the solution? Somewhere in the middle. Maybe you work less hours but the company gets more productivity.

Another thought I had was would they let others go and pay you more? The reality is it's a supply and demand game. If there are more developers out there then there are jobs, the price of the job actually goes down. With the mass layoffs that the AI revolution could cause, the cost of a software developer will go down dramatically. So, more devs than the supply means lower prices for the devs, even if they are producing more value than before.

At a previous job at Amazon (right after IPO in 2001-2003), they noticed people were killing themselves working. Many of the ones who got through those hard times are now millionaires. But, the reality is that most startups don't pan out and your effort isn't worth anything in the end. To combat this, they considered the $/hr ratio. You control the amount of hours you put in but not the amount you get paid. More hours doesn't mean more money.

The AI vampire is real and people need to know about it. The idea is that the AI value capture needs to be shared between the company and the employees, to strike a good balance between competitiveness and sustainability. Although I want this to be true, incentivizes drive the future and this doesn't line up with the normal money now perspective of America. Even if it's not sustainable, CEOs are happy to just hire another developer after the previous one burns out.

They claim that AI has turned us all into Jeff Bezos: the easy stuff is already automated and the hard decisions are what is left. As the author said, you can only do 4 hours of incredibly deep work like this per day. Most of the time, you're just coasting. Now, AI has made coasting a thing of the past. 8 hours of this is humanly impossible for long periods of time.

I thought this was an interesting post on where AI is taking us. Frankly, I'm worried about the capabilities and what this will do to technology jobs in the future. To me, developers will still need time to come. At the very least, A) maintainability of software, B) design-level decisions, C) verifying output of LLMs. Without deep knowledge as a developer and simply using Claude Code, the software will become very bad very quickly.