Emphasis Mine

"I don't think they think they are writing software, I think [they think] they're midwifing a deity here."

"AI business models from many smaller companies… are fundamentally flawed. They're busy selling cost reduction, which works for a while, but value creation happens in a network."

"'It feels like we are all in a fishbowl waiting for our human masters to drop some food in a big aquarium,' someone wrote plaintively in a Slack for another project I joined that yielded barely any work."

"One of the defining traits of strong engineering leadership in the A.I. era will be the ability to distinguish polished output from real judgment."

"Small teams have coherence for free; the multiplier is uniformly positive there, which is why the loudest agent boosters tend to be small teams, and why they are mostly right about their own context."

"In every recommended use, the human supplies the judgment and the tool supplies the throughput. This is a stronger position than human-in-the-loop. The tool sits outside the work, contributing where invited and silent otherwise, which is the opposite of what most agentic systems are now being built to do."

"If they need to chase five different people for incomplete documents, you're not going to speed up said process by adding more lawyers to the department."

"Value creation is more likely to happen when people use the machines for leverage, not when they try to do the work that the machine can do. Bullshit jobs will disappear, especially as the meme of corporations with less ballast catches on."

"Because the interviewer can't distinguish 'skipped steps due to incompetence' from 'skipped steps due to operating at a higher cognitive level,' they default to the interpretation that protects their ego."

"It's like a doctor hearing a patient who says, 'My knee hurts,' who then delivers a lecture on the elegance of the musculoskeletal system. The patient doesn't need you to appreciate the beauty of human biology. They need you to look at their damn knee."

"The accuracy of the forecasts has meant that when delivery dates aren't soon enough for a client, no one questions the accuracy of the forecasts. Instead, we get creative in ways to deliver sooner."

"When you stop using the agent, all the productivity benefit goes away... but the added maintenance costs don't! As long as that code's still around, you're stuck with lower productivity than if you had never touched the agent at all."

"What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for."

"What I didn't expect was how difficult it would be. I relate it somewhat to the feeling I have with working out. Often times I want to avoid it because it's hard, but I'm always happy when I push through and complete it."

"Stop. The problem isn't that you need a better system. The problem is you're avoiding doing the work."

"You can't advertise people out of reacting to their own experiences. This is a fundamental disconnect between how tech people with software brains see the world and how regular people are living their lives."

"I didn't get _why_, but I understood what it meant about that galaxy: the underclass deeply resented droids."