> Over the past month I’ve received three letters in a row from strangers — all software engineers I’ve never met. One was a frontend developer in infrastructure, another did data ops, the third was somewhere in between. The three letters look different, but they ask the same question.

Moments where I wonder why this is an apparent people sent me thoughts opinion column while at the same time not caring.

> These three questions are, fundamentally, the same question. On the surface it looks like an engineering question, or a career planning question, but underneath it is an existential question: once execution is fully taken over by machines, where does the human stand? Or more bluntly — once AI takes everything it can take, what is left for us?

As we will see later, the answers are just hustlerism.

But that’s very immediate and practical. So why this existential pose?

Because the societal questions have very immediate questions and answers as well if you don’t actively try to obfuscate with philosophical nonsense.

- Who benefits?

- Who will be left standing?

And the answers to those aren’t the machines, unless you’re some ideological cretin who believes in AI takeover while at the same time is working on building AI. They are also people.

And if your doomer narrative has labor of all sort vanishing, and it’s just a matter of time, interspersed with model gooning—who are the h-u-m-a-ns left?

Why hustler on the individual level, philosopher on the societal level?

> Later, some of them went out at night and smashed the machines. History calls them the Luddites. People usually treat them as fools who hated technology, but that’s a misreading—

No, it’s an intentional reading. But we’re too busy obfuscating to face obvious facts.

> So the real question is not “do you know how to use AI.” People who know how to use it today do hold an advantage over those who don’t, but the half-life of that advantage is maybe a year or two — and at the top of the field, possibly only one or two months. The pressure from each new model generation is mounting; the window for exploration and adaptation gets shorter every time. Every new model release brings another paradigm shift, and the workflow you painstakingly built, the prompting tricks you collected, the engineering scaffolding you accumulated — any of it can become a Spinning Jenny overnight

So what does this afford you in terms of amazing insight?

> My only method for dealing with this is what I call end-state thinking: don’t spend yourself on intermediate-state problems. Think and act with the endpoint as the premise.

Platitude nonsense.

Don’t look at the trees. Look at the whole forest.

> The threat to the job, the cultivation of the ability, the survival of subjecthood — all of these anxieties collapse, when gathered, into the same thing: we are afraid of losing our sense of value. Afraid that one day we will wake up and find we are no longer useful to this world. Being laid off is just the outer shell of that fear. The core is older: a person’s deepest fear has never been having no job. It is the suspicion that one is no longer worthy.

On the one hand, they say that you will be out of a job in two years time. Forever.

On the other hand, we’re fed this touchy-feely nonsense about going to work. Weird, I thought we were going to be punched in the balls with real materialistic dread, some real labor disciplining that keeps us desperate and fearful, not getting mind-lobbied over how ow-owwy our feelings will be when we are no longer fit to have our labor commodity exploited by billionaires or perhaps trillionaires (who are worthy because they have assets).

> So: after AI takes everything, what remains is not some second-best refuge — it is the place where the sense of value was always meant to live. AI is a receding tide. It washes away all the external anchors we carelessly threw out over the years — title, output, the feeling of being needed — and forces us to swim back to the one center that the tide cannot reach.

The destruction of your income is actually withering away at your materialistic fetters that keeps you from spiritual self-realization.

> In that old essay I gave that center a definition

How many links of this author are we supposed to have referenced now? I’m imagining a web of nonsense, but I can’t attest to that.

In fact I didn’t read most of this piece.

> This year, friends who know me well call me radical: I hand designs to AI, code to AI, review drafts to AI; next I’m preparing to hand over testing too.

Today, the radical is the one who radically builds on non-deterministic foundations.

> The real purpose of being radical is one thing only: before the macro trend arrives, keep finding new ground to stand on. All the time AI saves you must flow into growth and exploration — not into more requirements. This is a discipline I set for myself, and a sentence I repeat in every reply: if the dividends of efficiency get eaten entirely by workload, then this revolution is meaningless to the individual.

The real purpose of being a radical is being a bloodless grinder.

Yeah that’s about as much as I expected from someone writing about how a force might wipe out their income. From a software engineering perspective.

> To close, I want to return to those Luddites who smashed machines in the night.

Now let’s return to the Luddites and pretend that they were the only ones who rebelled against industrial society and that they only failed. Some real 12-hour days in the factory grindset.

> Back to the question in the first letter:

Could not meander more. Or, did you perhaps forget to refer to another essay here?

> But the answer to that question doesn’t depend on AI. It depends on where you are standing when that day comes: at the end of the assembly line, stamping approval on the machine’s output with an ever-lower bar, waiting for even the stamping to be optimized away? Or further upstream — where the questions are picked, where the standards are set, where the logic is guarded, where the world is built.

The old school answer was to organize with others. But that was just when most people could get a job, or had to anyway. When labor itself is about to be wiped out? Double down on being a bloodless hustler.

> The wind rises in the reeds. The great trend is never some monolith descending from the sky — it is composed of the choices of countless individuals in this very moment. to refuse to lower your standard for the sake of speed, to invest the saved hours into an exploration no one has done before — these tiny decisions are themselves the trend.

Yeah, what do I do when I am the author and think that the inevitability of tech is going to eat my livelihood? What rousing speech to manifest?

> The decision you make today to push the logical chain through on paper before opening the chat window,

Beyond embarrassing.

Pick a lane. You can’t scaremonger about AI Inevitability and have a rousing speech about the tiny decisions of Opening the Chat Window.