Adding another anecdote, but Pangram flagged an essay I wrote last week as AI-assisted when it wasn't. I take Pangram results with a grain of salt now.
"Shield the team from the business." The assumption underneath this one is that attention is finite and context switching is expensive. That assumption is intact. What changed is the cost of starving the team of context. Engineers prompting AI tools without business context just produce fluent, plausible, wrong work, at scale."
Too many teams and organizations have business types, mostly PM's who seek to lord over their area of know how and see themselves as delegators and mini CEOs, actively avoid looping engineers in to validate themselves. Engineers need to take on PM roles, and the PM role needs to be 1:50+ eng or go.
I have both experienced and hear my coworkers across the tech industry complaining about having to parse slop from their peers, management and juniors they work with. AI comments on their merge requests that sound right, but are subtly incorrect and irrelevant that add to their cognitive load. PRD (Product Requirements Document) slop from PM's that are adding features for the sake of it and is essentially busy work. Leadership asking to add AI to evaluate employees and dashboards out the wazoo.
The floor has been raised for sure, and I am writing less boilerplate than before, and am able to diagnose bugs in my work quicker, but the amount of people that seemingly just copy and paste the AI output without critically thinking is causing me distress. There are seemingly no consequences either, more AI = more good.
You still need handholding, you can’t just give a few junior devs Claude Opus 5 and expect them to recreate Instagram in a few weeks. Frontend and backend basics sure, but security, scale, etc. need prior knowledge.
I very much agree with this. Even the top tier models today, without the unit tests, without integration tests, and domain experts reviewing the code would flounder for 50% of the work they do. Sure they can write the unit tests and integration tests themselves, but at that point you aren't in need of a specific system being built, but rather an out of the box solution would probably fit your needs. It does speed up the grunt boilerplate work of development quite a bit, it does help with gnarly bugs and the like, but expertise is still needed. And we as engineers/programmers have systems in place that make using AI easier, we have the human context windows to be able to parse the technical jargon the AI spits out. Will AI for the masses be akin to slightly better automation?
This revenue growth in Search is artificial & extremely unhealthy for Google’s business long term
Search volumes are declining as legacy search is being increasingly cannibalized by non-monetized LLM queries
Google’s response?
Manufacture revenue growth via short-sighted, highly extractive, customer-hostile tactics. I.e. charge advertisers more for lower quality clicks, including clicks they do not want and explicitly did not approve Google to charge them for
A few examples to illustrate:
For all of its history until recently, Google operated on a 2nd price auction model
I.e. if you bid $5 CPC and the next highest bidder bids $1 CPC, Google charged you $1.01 for the click (one penny more than the 2nd highest bidder) rather than the $5 you bid
This was a genius move by Google early on as it incentivizes advertisers to input their true maximum willingness to pay rather than trying to play the game of bidding low and constantly adjusting to try to stay just ahead of the next highest bidder while still not paying too much
However recently, Google silently deprecated the 2nd price auction and began charging advertisers as much as their bid and budget caps allow, regardless of what anyone else is bidding
It’s a short-sighted cash grab at the expense of the long term health of the advertiser ecosystem
Making thing worse, Google also recently nerfed keyword targeting precision
Google previously had precise keyword targeting settings that allowed advertisers pick individual search phrases to bid on, defined down to the character w/ exact match or phrase match targeting
This was one of the core features that made search advertising magic, enabling advertisers to run extremely precise campaigns based on exactly what their target customer typed
But now, even if you bid on a specific term or phrase using the strictest exact
-match targeting settings, Google will show your ad across 1000’s of unrelated keywords, labeling them as as “exact match (close variant)”
The definition of “close variant” means whatever they want it to and changes constantly. The result is advertisers get billed for clicks that are totally irrelevant to their business and that their targeting settings explicitly forbid Google from targeting. Google does it anyway and there’s no ability to turn this off
So now exact match is broad match, and broad match is just meaningless spam
This is all very bad for advertisers, but for Google, it allows them to show your ad and bill you for clicks across 1000x more searches that were previously going unmonetized (mainly because they’re garbage queries no one wants)
This is how you grow revenue atop declining search volumes
Lastly, and perhaps most egregiously, Google quietly stopped respecting budget caps by a factor of 2x. For example campaigns we’ve been running for years with $1000 daily budget caps suddenly began spending $2000+ per day
And the extra spend is entirely on the garbage keywords Google arbitrarily throws in as “exact match (close variants)” which have no value to our business, but can’t be turned off
Google offers no refunds nor any recourse for overspend or spend on keywords you explicitly did not target
These are not the actions of a healthy business. These are the actions of company whose core business is in decline but desperately needs to pump quarterly earnings so Wall Street will continue to fund insane capex while hopefully looking through their rapidly deteriorating negative free cash flow
Google operated a benevolent monopoly for the better part of 25 yrs
Meaning the value Google captured from Search was but a small fraction of the value it created, and that spread produced a potential energy that justified expectations of high earnings growth far, far into the future
This is now no longer the case
At the alter of AI capex, Google is sacrificing the golden goose
People are positing she is saving face by claiming medical issues. She doesn’t seem to provide much value, whether its based on feedback from employees where she’s worked or the public interviews she’s done.
I don't think this essay by PG is sufficient to teach them log bases or compounding, and is manipulative to assume now that someone knows 2 million doubling 9 times is a billion, they should be accepting of how one can earn a billion dollars fairly.
Anthropic is big hall monitor energy. Clownish behavior and exaggerations constantly. A holier than thou attitude derived from rationalists at LessWrong.
Graduating a for profit private college that is aiming to maximize profit, by churning out specific degrees does not mean you are educated. Having a college degree is not synonymous anymore with well educated.
The measure (college degree) became a target, and thus it stopped functioning as intended.
Why did a PM create the merge request? It seems like internal testing brought up issues, why was it merged regardless? Is velocity a metric you were aiming for when merging this?
Large companies have been incentivizing and correlating token spend to performance, thus creating needless spend of tokens for now. Goodharts Law and all that.
I've heard the parable, "If you didn't eat breakfast or lunch yesterday, how would you feel around 3pm?", a common response is apparently "but I did eat lunch and breakfast yesterday".
Patrick (patio11) has been actively speaking about the Delve (YCW24) fraud allegations - (https://deepdelver.substack.com/p/192144506 - Pt2) extensively on X/Twitter. Delve's response is lacking.
Delve will soon fail as a visible example of fairness. The other startups exaggerating their product and financials will continue for now.
The founders fake interviews on TikTok were amusing to say the least, dropout 20 year olds with 8 papers published, we're dealing with Von Neumanns by the dozens.