To Live In A World Without AI | Nic Payne
I'm finding lately that I wish we could go back to pre-ChatGPT... A world
without a code-gen easy button, where "easy" was LSP autocomplete, wher
pype.dev [1]
We f&#ing said @pype [2], well f&#ing said. I think a lot of us are feeling this, we’ve pitched our brain into a bucket and we are no longer stretching it in the same way. We still work in similar ways of old, with new ways of turning off and saying yes a bunch of times. the best thing I can hope for is that as things get better we have fewer yes loops, and more architectural design debates and deep thoughts. But I fear deep thoughts are gone to the way of “research the leading 10 frameworks and pick the best one for this project.” and letting the clankers do the deep thinking. Its signing us up for a weird distopia.
I think a lot of us wish we could undo what has happened and go back to actually understanding what we are doing, but the world has changed, and if you are building average shit, like the average person, using models trained on average people doing average shit you cant keep up anymore.
Note
This post is a thought [3]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone ...
Posts tagged: llm
All posts with the tag "llm"
88 posts
latest post 2026-05-07
Publishing rhythm
My Thoughts on Beads | Nic Payne
[Steve Yegge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Yegge) is a pretty well-known individual in the tech field, having been
around for a long time at some of the
pype.dev [1]
I’m in step with @pype [2] here, I really want beads to work for me, but my systems for infra/platform work are all over the place, not one repo. I’m considering trying the BEADS_DIR env var but idk if it fits my workflow. For now, similar to @pype [2], I am rocking my own home vibed solution that I’ve intentionally put little effort in and its working great and I expect it to be broken and not working with the latest harnesses and models within a few months anyways, cause there is no predicting this train.
Note
This post is a thought [3]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: https://pype.dev/my-thoughts-on-beads/
[2]: https://pype.dev
[3]: /thoughts/
-
Vibe coding [1] is going so far into the news sphere now that Adam Savage even weighs in with perspectives from someone who has built a life around building things with his hands, keeping up with new making techniques, discovering old techniques as they combine with new. He talks about 3d printing reviving his love of the pantograph as one automation technique eases the most difficult part of another.
Note
This post is a thought [2]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: /vibe-coding/
[2]: /thoughts/
Notes – 06:34 Mon 23 Mar 2026
Notes – 06:34 Mon 23 Mar 2026
dbushell.com · dbushell.com [1]
Does anyone think fast-code will continue to pay the same salary? The answer isn’t to switch your brain off during your McCode shift and write a poem after work. Your job will be replaced by a Banglasdeshi slop-shop if AI improves (which is inevitable, apparently). Possibly the same sweatshop that loomed my £3 T-shirt. The Luddites didn’t accept their fate so easily.
David has some good points here, but I’m feeling the opposite direction a bit. Execs have always liked keeping the PM’s and the people steering the ship close by and were willing to farm out more and more grunt work. It feels like we are in a weird phase where there used to be a big group of people paid to write code. A few of them are exceptionally good at it and will remain. There will be a need for these people everywhere. Somehow we still need people hand editing assembly code optimizations, fortran, and cobol today. Those industries largely moved on, but a few great ones remain. I think this fast-code slop factory is going to be a short forgotten time in history, but no one yet knows what’s next. We are all waiting t...
-
Very interesting takes from @thdxr in this interview. A lot has been hashed out by others all over the place, but a hot take here is that code quality is higher than ever right now. Codebases are becoming more consistent than ever. If you are not starting with a good consistent base from the start you are poising your context and doomed to fail and have all the common failures of ai written code. He still reads almost every PR, and will read all of the code eventually. There are a few cases where reading the PR is not worthwhile only when its low stakes, knows that good patterns have been established and followed. He argues that someone needs to be the expert of the code and of the product still and fears that too many people not looking at prs will fail companies.
Note
This post is a thought [1]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: /thoughts/
Thinking about ai productivity again
Thinking about AI productivity again. It's allowing massive amounts of work to
get done, to levels that humans cannot physically type out in some cases. But
not all of this work is necessarily high value work. Right now I'm working on
one of the biggest PRs to an internal cli library. Probably the largest PR
I've ever done professionally. It touches all of the cli, refactors every
command, reaches into the business logic layers to drive deeper separation. I
reaches into the common layers to drive consistency. It ensures that every
command (50 or so) has similar flags, supports --plain, --no-color. It specs
out contracts to ensure that data goes out stdout, any extra goes out stderr.
This makes everything unix pipe friendly. There was quite a bit of research and
prep that went in, that turns out to already be distilled down into clig.dev.
The point is that this is all good work. It will make the product consistent,
repeatable, expected, and most of all boring. Most of the time, it wi...
-
Kids are leaving the party early, not drinking, cant watch netflix without the laptop open. They are leaving the party early to check on their agents. I get it, that feeling that you need to eek out one more prompt, keep your agents running. if they arent running what are you even doing. If not you 6 others are ready to pass you up. The timeline to be first has shrunk to nothing but unachievable.
Note
This post is a thought [1]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: /thoughts/
We are the Grey Beards
In November 2025 everyones beard lost its color, we aged into the next
generation without realizing it. If you were getting paid to write code at
this point in time, you are part of a special point in history where we used to
write code by hand. There will be systems air gapped systems somewhere devs
will continue to do it how we've always done it, some day they will peek out of
this cave and realize that they are the only ones left, no one else remembers
what its like. Writing code will quickly become a hobby that people do, in a
weird niche way. Not because you want to build something, but like the guy
with a mainframe in his garage that likes to watch the lights blink. Because
its nostalgic, it's a very cool skill, its fun and rewarding, but it won't be
to get something done.
Clankers got me tired
I spent all day grinding on a 20 minute fix. I want the agents to do it. They
can do it, but they are missing the harnesses they need to replicate my
workflows of old.
-
THIS, THIS is how most people are feeling about AI right now. Theres lots of “oh ai bad”, “but ai help”, “but ai company sleezy”. Cassidy did a fantastic job summarizing how most of us are feeling. Ending with well at the end of the day, I can’t do anything about the bad, the best thing I can do is learn how to embrace the good cause it aint going away any time soon.
Note
This post is a thought [1]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: /thoughts/
Is Ai Faster Yet
Is AI making us more productive yet, more faster yet?
Non-code # [1]
probably not
I’ve seen this question hitting all over the Internet lately, and often points
to people not writing code. Copilot turns prompts into emails, emails back
into summaries that look a lot like prompts. I think there’s a place for this,
making rambled thoughts sound more coherent, summarizing notes and meeting
minutes. All good stuff but does it make us more productive, probably not by
an amount that you can put $ $ behind, unless you are reducing headcount.
thats not what we are doing right???
Coding # [2]
with chat, probably not
When we talk about chatbots like gippity I think there’s a benefit to having
someone with jr skills in everything to talk to, someone who can read all of
the docs in an instant to get you some code snippet that might have taken all
day to research and get right, but more productive, probably not.
Agentic Coding # [3]
maybe
I’ve hit a stride with coding agents this year u...
-
Use a linux vps, It’s easy, just follow these simple instructions.
Note
This post is a thought [1]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: /thoughts/
-
Such a good interview @lexfridman is such a talented interview. It’s so cool to see the other side of this. For weeks we’ve heard about the story of the name change, we’ve seen everyone shitting on the security model, buying up all the mac minis in existance, fear mongering not to install this thing. @steipete [1] has such a cool story from the beginning talking about making this thing fun and exciting. Giving it a personality that is not “You are absolutely right”. The story of changing the name twice, and getting pwnd on every step the first time and nailing it the second time is incredible. Dude is having fun trying to make the thing he wants in the world exist.
Note
This post is a thought [2]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: https://steipete.me
[2]: /thoughts/
How To Run 5 Agents In Parallel Feb 2026 Edition
Are developers really running 5 agents in parallel? How the Heck do they keep
up with the changes? This seems Impossible.
I was listening to Syntax.fm this morning and heard this question, and thought
I’d throw in my take, which is probably pretty similar to Wes and Scott’s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrBQI9So5lM&list=PLLnpHn493BHHNUfHN5lDf11UD8jQ5Bpzl&index=1&t=99s [1]
Yes # [2]
Yes, developers are running 5 agents in parallel. It’s not that hard it
requires you to shift from thinking about the weeds and seeing the forest see:
Pm Not Babysitter [3]. It requires effort and diligence. Most importantly
it requires planning, it requires agents, it requires tooling.
Is anyone doing this all day? Probably not. At least not outside of the
startup companies that are building out tools to do this. Yes there are some,
there’s always outliers, but its going to be rare. To have multiple agents
running in parallel add day you need a lot of tokens, access to good models,
and right now ...
Pm Not Babysitter
Stop babysitting your agents, treat them like a real team and they will reward
you.
Back in December I saw theo make a comment that code is now cheap, its the run
rate of models, He quoted a study, not sure that he fully even believed it, but
it claimed that the average developer after all meetings, training, emails,
planning and extra shit in their day averages out 10 well tested lines of code
per day. Opus 3.5 made him 10k loc (lines of code) that day.
We have all agreed for decades that lines of code is not a proxy to
productivity or quality. Often more code means more risk, more review, more
infrastructure. This has become MUCH different. Lines of code are still far
from any sort of good metric. That aside, your agents are not doing 10k lines
with you babysitting them, and in fact its very likely that the product quality
is MUCH worse as you babysit them.
You need a tool for planning and tracking, otherwise you are playing babysitter
rather than Product Manager (PM).
The shovelware cometh
In September of last year, I covered a post by Mike Judge arguing that AI coding claims don’t add up, in which he asked this question:
If so many developers are so extraordinarily productive usi…
jerodsanto.net [1]
Not surprising theirs a lag, between the models getting better, the tools getting better, and the masses getting better at using them, it takes time. This is still quite a hockey stick. I’m wondering how many are not posting on Show HN embarrassed they built something they know nothing about and afraid to get questions. I have no idea how anyone would get this ratio, but if I were a betting man, Id bet the ratio of build/show went way up. Plus we are probably getting a ton of people who have never heard of HN start building cool bespoke things for themselves and thats it, they use it, they love it, they might tell/show a friend.
Note
This post is a thought [2]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: https://jerodsanto.net/2026/02/the-shovelware-cometh/
[2]: /thoughts/
The shovelware cometh
In September of last year, I covered a post by Mike Judge arguing that AI coding claims don’t add up, in which he asked this question:
If so many developers are so extraordinarily productive usi…
jerodsanto.net [1]
Not surprising theirs a lag, between the models getting better, the tools getting better, and the masses getting better at using them, it takes time. This is still quite a hockey stick. I’m wondering how many are not posting on Show HN embarrassed they built something they know nothing about and afraid to get questions. I have no idea how anyone would get this ratio, but if I were a betting man, Id bet the ratio of build/show went way up. Plus we are probably getting a ton of people who have never heard of HN start building cool bespoke things for themselves and thats it, they use it, they love it, they might tell/show a friend.
Note
This post is a thought [2]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: https://jerodsanto.net/2026/02/the-shovelware-cometh/
[2]: /thoughts/
External Link
X (formerly Twitter) · x.com [1]
I tried this flow [of running an opencode server on tailscale] on day one of getting opencode, I wanted to prompt from my phone while were were running lights at the theater. It kinda worked, but the ui was really bad on phone, hard to use and the experience overall–it felt buggy. Happy to see they are making improvements and it might now be ready for some real use.
https://dropper.waylonwalker.com/file/9065fcb2-5e40-479c-967e-498bc9bb6a4f.mp4
Note
This post is a thought [2]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: https://x.com/thdxr/status/2017691649384620057
[2]: /thoughts/
Ping 21
Agents right now
* can I access the project you mentioned?
> yes
* Can i access /tmp
> yes, just do it
* While I'm I at it, `kubctl delete...`
> yanks plug front internet
Agent Management Is Exhausting
The state of development in early 2026 is all wrapped around learning how to
manage many agents running in parallel. Everyone’s trying to figure out the
workflow.
The Plan Is Everything # [1]
The secret I’ve discovered is a good, well-defined plan. This could be a
markdown file or a GitHub issue. Agents are actually great at writing these for
you. They’ll include reproduction steps, outline changes needed, and structure
the work.
This is your opportunity to step in. Read the plan. Look for hallucinations.
Spot where it’s going off track. Edit the plan before the agent starts coding.
I had one today where it laid out reproduction steps beautifully, but I could
add context about network requests that completely changed the approach. This
editing phase is what most people are missing right now. Skip it and you’ll
watch your agent solve the wrong problem with impressive efficiency.
The Pace Problem # [2]
Here’s what nobody warned me about: managing these things is exhausting.
Dep...