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That brings me back to the momentum Pai describes. First principles thinking makes working that way feel natural. When you truly understand what you’re trying to accomplish, it’s easier to take a small step, learn from it, and keep going. If you’re doing it right, working with agents lets that back-and-forth happen much faster. You get faster learning loops and more momentum, oriented around deep understanding. To me, that’s the new flow state.

There will probably come a day when I always get sensible answers to these questions that convince me the model knows what it’s doing. But today is not that day. About half the questions I ask get answers that convince me3 the model has made a mistake

The personal website is coming back because people are rediscovering something the early Web made obvious: the Internet is more interesting when individuals have places of their own. We spent roughly twenty years moving into a handful of very large apartment buildings. Some people are starting to build houses again.

If every lab stopped training new models tomorrow, that wouldn’t change the fact that GPT-6 Astra and Fable 5.1 are already enough to change how large parts of the economy work. The capability overhang between what those models can do today and what most folks are using them for is massive.

Whatever else you say about the AI doomers, they have more than two decades’ history of explicitly spelling out exactly what they believe and why, even when it was complete science fiction to talk about AI at all. They’ve earned the right to be treated as sincere.

In fact, with Astra and Fable I feel like not only are the costs astronomical, but the models are also just not for me as a software engineer. And presumably that’s because these models increasingly are for other people. For lawyers, 3D artists, mathematicians, whoever uses computer use, etc.

it is not even obvious that AIs aren’t conscious! People often dismiss this point by diagnosing it (to my mind, the absolute worst way to argue against anything), or by pointing at some philosophical theory that suggests it might be impossible in principle to construct artificial sentient minds.

I think we are asking the wrong question. Maybe the question should be, are humans obviously conscious?

Staying ahead of the models is a moving target. At the start of 2026, “make working changes to large codebases” was in this category, but now it’s not. For this reason, I doubt that you can retreat to some “hard engineering” area that requires deeper expertise. That might work in the short term, but not forever. If LLMs can find a better lower bound on the Riemann hypothesis, they will soon1 be able to write solid high-performance kernel drivers or GPU shaders or whatever.

We’re going to need to create a cost for the sender (so it can’t scale to ridiculous) as well as an identity layer (so scammers can’t be fully anonymous–reputation is earned, not invented). It might be an open protocol in the spirit of the best parts of the net, or it might be a single monopolist that figures out how to extract value from it.

Brilliant advice for dealing with slop from your coworkers.