That was weird. And it'll get weirder.

People ask me why I do this writing. (Usually in admiration? I hope? Not the “why don’t you stop, it’s annoying” version, I think.😊). I’ve always thought of this as somewhat of a “letters to my younger self” project, though of course, it’s also letters to my current self - a way of recording and making sense of patterns and systems I happen to notice.

Until the past year, the letters have been about human teams and interactions, for the most part. But I’ve noticed, and I’m sure you have, that gradually AI topics have taken it over. I don’t love that, it feels kind of boring and repetitive, but the reality is that AI has been most of what is on my mind, as I, and others, try to navigate our way through this very weird transition.

Looking back not just over this year, but the past three, I still think I believe the things I started out believing, even with lots of evidence and new capabilities. At the most fundamental, I believe we are in the middle of a huge transformation - it’s hard to overstate the impact of industrializing thought at scale. I heard the phrase “we taught the sand to think” - it’s poetic and doesn’t really say much, but it captures the sense of weirdness, awe, and pit-of-your-stomach thrill this period has had for me.

I still believe that AI is a tool, that we can, and will, use it to unleash human creativity, and if we do, we will all benefit to the degree we did in the first industrial revolution (and I do still believe this is the second - the first was the industrialization of physical power, this one is the industrialization of cognitive power). My teams and I continue to see increased capabilities and leverage from wrapping code and other tools around LLMs - the shorthand for this is “agents”, and while I still don’t like the anthropomorphizing (I still think it’s dangerous and misleading), the handle is useful. But there are many ways to build these tools and use these systems, just like the first industrial revolution gave us all kinds of new tools, techniques and materials. We don’t call all of them “tech things” and we shouldn’t paint all of the AI tools with a similar broad brush.

The pace is fast and getting faster. In the coding world, models are now extremely capable, and most senior engineers working closely with advanced coding models see huge disruption coming to all of software: roles are blurring, new skills are emerging (and some old skills are no longer relevant), the mix of employment and demand for engineers is changing in chaotic ways, and software itself will likely undergo large changes as the economics of both creation and distribution change. It’s faster and easier than ever to build software, models are getting more capable all the time. Assumptions like the cost of tech debt are likely to fall soon, and the dynamics of the industry will change accordingly.

If you’re not a coder, you shouldn’t feel insulated from that change either. Code is easier in some ways - there are easy ways to train it, lots of examples, and it’s structured well for LLMs. But code is probably just “going first” as an existence proof for other knowledge work. If your job is fundamentally “follow complex instructions and push buttons”, AI will come for it eventually.

I will continue to watch, build, think, and write in the coming year. Change is hard, and uncertainty is scary. We are in a period of both, like it or not. But I take comfort in precedent - we each live almost unimaginable lives compared to a few hundred years ago. AI has the potential to give us so much - creativity, education, understanding, even compassion - if we use it well. The industrial revolution showed us, via two horrible world wars, and numerous other 20th century disasters, that we have to be our better selves as our tools get more powerful. And that is perhaps the last lesson I take away from this year: AI is one of the most powerful tools we’ve ever invented. We have to bring our best human selves to the table to use it well. If we do, this can be a new golden age.

Have a good holiday! I’m going to take time off until the new year.