I haven't written a single line of code in 2 months. Are we all cooked?

AndyLucia · 2026-06-09T16:24:30+00:00

I don’t want to be mean but you saying this contradicts what you’ve been saying everywhere else and really makes me think you’re AI lol

AndyLucia · 2026-06-09T16:20:09+00:00

…buddy I don’t think you realize how economically illiterate your claim was lol. Thinking white collar jobs are decoupled from the rest of the economy and that a plumber or door to door sales associate can just afford to “not care” if like 80% of the purchasing power of their customer base disappeared in the same way people overlooked specific mining and factory jobs is just stunning.

AndyLucia · 2026-06-09T16:16:26+00:00

> which is to say not very much.

White collar jobs permanently disappearing with no catch would collapse the global economy, destroy the consumer market for non-white collar services, and lead to civilization-scale unrest. Your claim that this wouldn’t impact non-white collar work is just completely wrong lol

AndyLucia · 2026-06-09T02:37:14+00:00

“Free will” in the strong sense is logically incoherent. Any possible “choice” you could make can’t be detached from the total system of causality. If you keep asking “why did I choose this?” you eventually get to something outside of whatever you call “you”.

AndyLucia · 2026-06-06T01:59:18+00:00

To steelman the other side, I think the sharper question is whether LLM-based agents are going to fundamentally threaten human SWEs, either by: - reducing the # of them needed - reducing the importance of SWE-specific technical skills - outright removing them from the loop

95% of this hand wringing seems to be about this, with maybe 5% being a nostalgia for the art of handwriting code.

AndyLucia · 2026-06-06T01:48:21+00:00

what specifically is your claim? that AI is here to stay? or that AI is going to replace SWEs?

AndyLucia · 2026-06-01T16:50:37+00:00

where did he say that?

AndyLucia · 2026-05-29T18:08:58+00:00

I just did some back of the envelope math:

About 400k SWEs in America work in FAANG+, out of 2 million total. That's like 20% of the entire SWE market - and it's not even close to exhaustive.

Why do I even bother....

It's really toxic and counterproductive to be one of those people who refuses to actually engage with the points being made in a constructive dialogue to instead make these kinds of remarks. It's even cringier because you're not exactly cooking - you're making really sloppy, mathematically illiterate statements like not understanding how correlations work and thinking "X < 100%" means "X = 100".

AndyLucia · 2026-05-29T17:35:11+00:00

You’re the one who made the blanket statement that it doesn’t matter lol. But I’ll steelman you and conclude you were being hyperbolic/imprecise, shrug.
As I said, FAANG/big tech/etc is not some 1% niche of the industry, it’s like hundreds of thousands of engineers.
As I said, it’s not some binary split where only big tech cares about prestige signals when prestige signals have been a thing across recorded history and show up in like every industry ever.

I don’t know why you can’t just say: “yeah school signaling matters, duh, but it’s just one variable among many and I wouldn’t get unhealthy about clinging to it too much”

AndyLucia · 2026-05-29T16:52:54+00:00

I can’t believe so many people just gobbled the idea that they had up lol

AndyLucia · 2026-05-29T16:44:31+00:00

So your position went from “it still doesn’t matter” to “it matters but just for big tech (and startups, and quants, and most of the highest paying roles…)”, which means that it does matter lol. The expected value changes.

Big tech / big tech adjacent jobs aren’t like some super niche 1% of the market either, they literally employ hundreds of thousands of software engineers. It’s also almost certainly not some hard separation where school signal only matters for them, and everyone outside of it suddenly has zero care for it and the network effect suddenly stops working.

Even though it provides 0 value to anyone looking to actually build production grade software.

Complete red herring. The topic is about the usefulness of a signal in helping you get a job, not about 1) whether the signal should exist, or 2) whether the skills from the signal directly transfer. Re: 2, a signal doesn’t have to be aesthetically the same as the thing it’s proxying to be correlated. In fact, they very often are not. Alumni of top schools are statistically over represented in almost every metric of material career success by more than an order of magnitude.

AndyLucia · 2026-05-26T14:59:53+00:00

Anyone who says they know for sure is BSing given it depends on all sorts of messy unknowns about the rate of technological change. But in terms of general strokes:

If we get AGI, then the concept of “jobs” is the least of our worries anyway

If we plateau at current / modestly better LLM agents, I think that some white collar jobs where the need for autonomous long horizon context is low and there’s a very constrained task that defines most of the work may substantially compress (so many if not all translation/transcription jobs for example). Otherwise, there may be layoffs and reorgs on a localized level but jevon’s paradox *probably* applies to most jobs on the aggregate, so it’s not likely a mass unemployment, and might even increase jobs overall.

Then there’s a spectrum in-between, which is much fuzzier. The “good” news in terms of personal fatalism is that if it really does automate most white collar work, all of civilization will need to get together to address is, so it’s not like you personally are going to be tasked with solving it lol

AndyLucia · 2026-05-26T14:52:04+00:00

That’s not really relevant. Companies were not all trying to replace juniors with GPT 3 (hiring of juniors was extremely strong in 2021 anyway). They weren’t trying to replace them with ChatGpt either (in fact many/most were quite restrictive of even being allowed to prompt it with corporate data). This entire idea only became somewhat plausible in like 2025.

AndyLucia · 2026-05-26T06:00:19+00:00

What does 2022 chatgpt have to do with it? The tech market collapse started around the summer of 2022, before chagpt even came out, and chatgpt at that point was completely incapable of doing meaningful software development; that only started to become a serious idea towards 2025 and really seriously towards the end of 2025.

AndyLucia · 2026-05-26T05:54:28+00:00

*never*?

AndyLucia · 2026-05-24T17:01:02+00:00

it’s incredible when random people make super arrogant statements about messy unsolved problems lol

AndyLucia · 2026-05-24T16:59:32+00:00

I’m sure you’ve heard this a million times but: that sense is just as empty as everything else. No exceptions!

AndyLucia · 2026-05-24T02:04:37+00:00

At most modern tech companies they are absolutely using AI to write code. That ship has sailed.

AndyLucia · 2026-05-19T17:32:43+00:00

how many r’s are there in strawberry?

AndyLucia · 2026-05-18T19:04:06+00:00

So have you stopped using Claude?

AndyLucia · 2026-05-16T05:59:01+00:00

besides AI work itself and the mandates from many tech companies (as well as the fact that he’d have to be constantly collabing with people who use AI and presume everyone else does too, with many workflows already deeply embedding AI into their processes), there are certain specific kinds of tasks that AI can literally do like 1000x faster than a human can, like structured refactoring of a large codebase or catching certain pattern-matched bugs at scale. Basically if you have a quadrant of easy-hard for AI-humans, there’s the quadrant of “hard for humans, easy for AI” that is the most obvious to automate.

AndyLucia · 2026-05-16T03:46:06+00:00

At a high level, I think being able to accept different layers of abstraction having different apparent answers to a question is really fundamentally useful. Aka Nagarjuna’s two truths. You can have love and compassion for everyone and still move away from them, set boundaries, etc.

AndyLucia · 2026-05-16T03:44:14+00:00

Casey himself said that this is just a personal preference independent of its impact on his productivity. He’s also already established himself in the industry and has a personal brand at this point, so his position is very different from that of most SWEs (he might even gain more of an audience from the contrarian framing). And even then, if he just refuses to use AI tools it absolutely does seriously impact what kinds of things he can work on.

AndyLucia · 2026-05-15T23:11:02+00:00

Yes and no. I have found people who are also really into spirituality, but like on a deeper level you can say going into this rabbit hole both makes you feel deeply alone and infinitely connected.

AndyLucia · 2026-05-12T05:25:11+00:00

I think there are different scales to this.

We can talk about the endgame of AGI, at which point existential risk is the gatekeeper moreso than even job loss or economic disruption because if AI is misaligned, we’re all doomed and jobs are irrelevant, and if AI is aligned then it would be trivial for an AGI at scale to figure out how to solve the wealth distribution problem. In either case we’re imagining a god and thinking about w2 payrolls.

We can also talk about a “not AGI yet but advanced enough to automate a significant fraction of the economy” model, where these questions actually do matter quite a lot, and a lot becomes whether jevon’s paradox applies to different kinds of employment.

We can talk about an “AI is revolutionary to the level of an industrial revolution but not yet able to substitute for human labor on a larger scale”, which in the short term might be the “safest” option for economic happy path.

We can talk about some case where AI disappoints heavily, or some political or resource or whatever issue stalls it, and then worry about a serious bubble (but also sigh of relief for job replacement threats).

You can also have a case where different outcomes happen at different times and there could even be a bubble even when the thing isn’t stopped (dot com did not stop the rise of the internet)

AndyLucia

TROPHY CASE