I just don't understand how someone could think we're going back to a pre-LLM world. Have you not used one since Opus 4.5 came out?

Especially as somebody that's no longer in the software profession and so doesn't have 40 hours a week to just sit there and crank out code, agentic AI is a technological leap on the level of search engines, bulletin boards or compilers.

You can literally just open Claude Code, say:

- "Add these domains with these mailboxes to an SMTP server running on my homelab, forward all incoming and outgoing via mxroute"

- "Port this unmaintained app from 2017 to modern Android, and then test it on an emulator and sign it with my real key for distribution via Google Play"

- "get my GitHub Actions runner on Linux, Windows, macOS and Android, ensuring that it supports all available architectures from the last decade and a half, then check your outputs in a loop until it works"

and it just spits it out while you do the dishes.

Someone the other day talked about "AI psychosis psychosis" and it absolutely stuck with me. The people who deny this is a big deal are in la-la land.

We could literally hit a brick wall in terms of model intelligence now and it would still be a game changer.

No revolution revolutionizes in the way planned or hyped. Instead, once triggered, it emerges mostly unplanned. It unfolds as the product of human action but not of human design.

Individuals will use LLMs as they see fit in their work. They'll make a lot of mistakes because they don't see their own work clearly and because they don't really understand the outcomes others care about. Executives who make their money with their mouths will, of course, endlessly open their mouths, even as they don't understand the tech because they never really use any tech beyond email, text, and phones. And so on.

Nobody knows how LLMs will ultimately shake out. But even five minutes of using Claude makes it hard to imagine all white-collar work will continue as in the past.

Even as a teenager the singularity didn't make sense to me. Why would AI capabilities suddenly improve by an astronomical amount? It's still going to be running on hardware and software that we (humans) design. Even if AI reached parity with human brains it would still need to improve efficiency by orders of magnitude to reach parity with human society's output. And only then could it start to outpace the improvements that humans are making.

Even if the AI singularity is possible, the acceleration would take a long time. Possibly a lifetime.

The thing i never got about the singularity is that its just one concept that was suggested by a few notable people over time. There is so many different ways AI can go, some which we wouldn't have foreseen.

> Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society.

Seriously? Maybe I’m just getting old, but having lived through the dot-com hype in the 1990s, the XML hype in the 2000s, and the cloud hype in the 2010s, this has been an utterly predictable hype cycle around AI. This does not mean that AI is completely useless. It will impact the world but not in the ways the snake oil salesmen are claiming. This is very similar to the internet. The best bubbles are built on a kernel of truth that is then blown way out of proportion and wrapped in layers of snake oil fabrication.

> I personally can't wait for this to end, and for everyone to collectively get back to waiting for whatever the next golden ticket that's supposed to solve all of our problems turns out to be.

So, you’re committed to falling for the next one, too, eh?

Each new iteration of the hype cycle feels "like its not hype" because the tech is more promising in new ways, but the hype comes from human perception. New tech has to fight a lot of real world and project management issues, and development morphs and slows. We don't know exactly what we have until it faces these issues.

I totally agree with all your points except welcoming the singularity.

How do you imagine your or your children's lives in the singularity?

What do you do there for a living, or which hobbies do you pursue in the best case it frees you and everyone around to pursuit nothing but hobbies?

What do you do in the worst case it pushes everyone to underground strongholds to fight machines for the survival of the humankind?

And if there's some middle ground, how is it different from today's state of affairs?

It was the same thing with blockchain, who here remembers the peak delusion of IoT + smart contracts replacing human judicial systems and crypto making central banks useless?

LLMs are of course a form of progress, the same way blockchain was, but it has been baffling and cringy nonetheless to see people with a strong technical background pretending that at some point in the future the development of complex applications was going to be reduced to a few prompt lines written in English.

Once the AI fad dies and the next hype appears I told myself I'm going to jump on it to take financial advantage of it. At this point I believe that the technological cycle of hype is an almost entirely social/economic phenomenon and there is no reason not to make money from it given that people insist on this kind of irrational behavior.

Right, and there are two parallel tracks. First is the “every crack and crevice” part - “ summarize with AI”, “re write with AI”, “help me write”, “analyze with AI”, basically useless features being splattered everywhere in the name of incorporating AI while annoying the F out of everyone.

The second is the AI race / existential risk / pretending we’re Oppenheimer track which I think is the larpiest, basically pretending that LLM chatbots are some kind of super weapon and role playing accordingly.

None of this means they’re useful, AI coding, for one, obviously is a valuable tool (though there remains a lot to sort out). But the usefulness is unfortunately being overshadowed by, as you say, people not resetting expectations and instead wanting to play terminator or neuromamcer or whatever (I’m sure there are more relevant sci fi).

> It hasn't worked out like that

It seems quite premature to say that. We're 3 to 4 years into the LLM revolution and the rate of progress is still impressive. The recursive self-improvement aspect that is necessary for the actual singularity is something we're only really starting to get into this year.

If the singularity is 5 years from now, that is still much sooner than most people (including me) previously expected it to happen.

I think people think things will go faster than they do. The AI revolution will probably be a bit like the industrial revolution which took a couple of centuries to go from Newcomen's steam engine of 1712 to mass produced cars and the like. With AI, Turing came up with his test in 1950 and it's taken about 75 years to get to something that looks like passing. Give it time.

> Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society.

I don't want to sound like a jerk, so please let me know if I do - I don't understand why you claim that "most of us" felt that way. I ignored "AI" until mid 2024. Then I tried it and was very unimpressed. I tried again in 2026. Seemed useful, then very quickly I realized that it's something that looks great until you look closer.

I was never impressed by a text generator. A talking computer might be the most boring thing I could imagine. I never understood why people got so obsessed by it and I certainly don't understand why it would "change society". Society is composed of people. What would change society is something that would allow people to think less, feel more clearly, express themselves more freely, and suffer less. Of course, things that accomplish these results exist, but they require a lot of effort. I cannot fathom how a technology that doesn't lead to these results could revolutionize anything. In fact, every technology, that I witnessed arising since late 90s has made things worse precisely because it has not done anything to address the human condition, instead praying on it.

We are still in time for the "revolution" ... but it will take longer and won't look like than most thought.

We still need a bubble pop to drive out all nonsense ideas and paths.

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