I’m likewise baffled. Healthcare spending is a major cost for all employers. Decoupling healthcare from employment would theoretically remove this cost immediately. Shouldn’t pro-business groups have long been lobbying for this?

The fact that they are not tells me there must be some other financial incentives at work that are unclear to me.

I strongly agree with this take — and that’s partly why the article posted here leaves me scratching my head. PRs are already the gate, right? I don’t care what an agent does or doesn’t do within the confines of its workspace assuming their contributions are gated via a git repository and they don’t require exotic access to a production environment to do their development.

I’m also with you on the junior / mid-level engineer framing (a “brilliant” junior engineer perhaps, one who graduated from at the top of their class from the best CS program in the country) with a big caveat: AI is like a junior engineer who doesn’t know how to learn.

It’s like you’re working with the guy from Memento. Every day your LLM reports to work and they’ve learned nothing from your work so far. Every day is the first day!

Now like the Memento guy you can help them to scatter their workspace with sticky notes and reminders everywhere. With some effort you can start to approximate that thing called “learning” which is LITERALLY the most important trait of every single software developer on a team.

But I confess it’s a struggle for me and the available tooling isn’t there yet. The best I’ve done looks closer to the “second brain” people use tools like Obsidian for. Sadly I don’t think a second brain is a substitute for a first brain. And to be 100% honest any engineer who exhibited the same inability to learn and grow as an AI agent would be sacked after their first month on the job at any company I’ve ever worked at.

I’m actually reasonably optimistic that either the main AI providers or someone else will improve on this in the coming years. It certainly feels like a decent memory paired with a well architected thinking system that’s better at contextually injecting memories (I find LLMs today don’t know what they don’t know unless you force them to put metaphorical sticky notes all over the place) as well as capturing real learnings without supervision shouldn’t be an impossible task requiring novel technical structures.

Anyhow I’d love to be wrong about some of the above and I’m always reading articles like this one hoping that someone has solved these problems already and that I’m just slow on the uptake. But as of today, I’m only modestly better at architecting such agents than I was when I started.

Permanent DST is just a synonym for "let's all agree to wake up an hour earlier." The same change could be affected by e.g. schools and businesses agreeing to open at 8am instead of 9am. (Of course that would be wildly unpopular so permanent DST is just way to trick people into swallowing the pill.)

But would behavior change in the long run? Countries like Spain where solar noon differs wildly from clock noon just end up aligning their rituals accordingly (e.g. eating dinner at 9pm).

> The same change could be affected by e.g. schools and businesses agreeing to open at 8am instead of 9am.

School starts at 8am everywhere that I know of in northern New England and always has? Does school start at 9am where you live?

And as noted, an 8am start to the working day is long established in certain parts of Vermont and New Hampshire. It has not been "widely unpopular." It's nice to get a few minutes of sunlight and twilight after work in winter.

People may adjust their eating times or leisure activities, but work is 9 to 5. It's amazing to have almost 5 hours of sunlight after work

It seems to me the parent commenter is saying the opposite: looking exactly like each other _is_ the point. It's a form of social signaling, to indicate that a project "belongs" to the in group of high-flying successful AI hype projects.

Note I'm not arguing that this is a good strategy. But given that so many people follow it I imagine it's not as bad as it appears on the surface.

It's a bit of in-group signaling but I think, importantly, also date signaling. A 2026 hype website looks different from a 2020 hype website looks different from a 2010 hype website. Having a generic 2026 hype website look tells visitors that you're either new or update your website's design to follow current trends.

They do the same with cars, where it's even more important and even more explicit. The design language has to change every couple years so that you can tell when somebody is driving a car older than 5 or so years. For example, currently we're doing blobs but with a few sharp features and muted colors. Before that it was more colorful and more metallic paint. Before that, in the 00s, it was pure blobs. Before that it was all sharp edges etc. Now sharp edges are beginning to make a comeback.

That's why I don't think we'll ever have the "one true design language". Fads and trends will continue, repeating themselves to a degree but also changing in new ways.

I’d much, much prefer people were honest about AI answers and text and had the decency to cite it explicitly when they use it.

What I hate far worse than what this article complains about is just blatant AI writing in articles, comments, video narration you name it.

Way more insidious, way bigger problem!

It’s aggressively AI written. I’d rather just read the prompt.

It’s unfortunate because many of us are going “full AI” when it comes to coding. And there are some true gives and takes that are interesting to explore.

Sadly, this piece reads like pure hype.

Yes, and it immediately called to mind for me the phrase “the map is not the territory.”

Put another way: no matter how detailed or “perfect” you make a map, it will never be the territory, ie the thing that is mapped.

Computers and AI are like a map in this regard —- just ones and zeros that we have assigned meaning to arbitrarily. No matter how “good” AI gets, it’s still just a map of the thing not the thing itself.

So AI saying “I feel sad” is never more than a representation of sadness that should not be confused with the subjective experience of sadness itself.

If you make a big enough map you can fly it over and drop it on the territory I guess. Then does it become the territory?

According to the paper, no.

It’s AI.

The metaphor that’s popped into my head recently is baking bread.

You can learn to bake good bread. It’s not _that_ hard. And it’ll probably taste better than store bought bread.

But it almost certainly won’t be cheaper. And it’ll take a more more time and effort.

Still, sometimes you might bake your own bread for kicks. But most of the time, you’ll just buy the bread someone else has already perfected.

Baking bread also takes hours of waiting.

I can have fresh bread anytime I want from a handful of nearby stores.

I was more bothered by the extraneous word spacing on the second line, between “and” and “the.” Is it just me?

I noticed that but I guess it's to avoid the vertical river.

I'll bite. What's a vertical river?

I don't understand the use of "I'll bite" when the message you're answering to is obviously not... bait. Are we now saying "I'll bite" before every question we ask?