If you work 40 hours a week, about 6 of those hours actually matter. The other 34 are maintenance, “busywork,” meetings that could’ve been emails, and a whole lot of goofing around.

the biggest danger with long-running agents following an elaborate plan is the same as always: When it works, magic. When it makes a small mistake early on, you now have 6000 lines of code that needs a rewrite. Waterfall didn't work for humans, why would it work for agents?

he most important thing to know about labor substitution, the place where any serious analysis has to start, is this: labor substitution is about comparative advantage, not absolute advantage. The question isn’t whether AI can do specific tasks that humans do. It’s whether the aggregate output of humans working with AI is inferior to what AI can produce alone: in other words, whether there is any way that the addition of a human to the production process can increase or improve the output of that process. That’s a very different question.

With AI you can DDOS your enemies through a legal system that has no defense infrastructure to protect itself or its citizens.

When a system gets overrun, the people with means find the side door. When public school systems decline, the rich kids go to private schools. When cities get dirty and violent, people with means to move go to the suburbs.

The people who can afford to step outside the system, which has been flooded with zero-signal AI slop, will quickly and efficiently do so. In fact, they will be greeted with open arms by the person on the other side of the transaction.