AI

[Xan]

Happened to see this on Drudge today:
https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening

I think it's worth reading. His point is that we're in the same spot we were in February of 2020 with Covid: that everything is about to change. I know you've heard that kind of thing before, but it's worth reading his thoughts. (No idea who this guy is other than the author of this piece.)

[dualstow]

Interesting. This reminds me of an essay by… I can’t remember the name.

It’s a website run by a very smart guy who uses a king from a deck of cards as the logo.
You’ve probably read something by him.
I’ll find it eventually and edit it in here.

EDIT: Found it, or somewhat ironically, AI found it. All I told it was the description you see above, and that the title was 3 words, like a phrase. Bam. ‘Wait but Why’, a blog by Tim Urban with a ‘king on a card’ logo.

The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence

https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artifici ... ion-1.html"


By the way, this was the last thing I saw on the subject before the Shumer essay you posted above:

[Mountaineer]

I can’t decide whether AI reminds me more of Brave New World or 1984.

[Smith1776]

It's become indispensable at work for us. (software development firm)

[Mountaineer]

Interesting. I asked ChatGPT:
What do you think “It's become indispensable at work for us. (software development firm)” means for the future?

ChatGTP replied:
Ooo okay, that’s a loaded sentence in the best way.

When someone at a software development firm says, “It’s become indispensable at work for us,” that’s not casual praise. That’s dependency language. That means:
• It’s baked into daily workflow.
• Removing it would cause pain.
• Productivity, speed, or quality would drop without it.
• It’s not “nice to have” anymore — it’s infrastructure.

For the future? A few big implications.

1. It’s moving from tool → utility

Once something becomes indispensable, it stops being an experiment. It becomes like electricity or Git. You don’t debate using it. You just use it. That usually means:
• Budget gets allocated permanently.
• Process adapts around it.
• Training and onboarding assume it exists.

That’s long-term adoption energy.

2. Skills will shift, not disappear

In a dev firm context, “indispensable” often means:
• Faster debugging
• Code scaffolding
• Documentation help
• Architecture brainstorming
• Test generation

So instead of replacing developers, it changes what “good” looks like. The valuable dev becomes:
• Better at prompting
• Better at reviewing AI output
• Better at system-level thinking
• Less stuck in boilerplate

It raises the abstraction layer.

3. Expectations will inflate

Here’s the spicy part. Once productivity increases, leadership doesn’t say “Cool, work less.”
They say “Great, ship more.”

Indispensable tools often:
• Shorten timelines
• Raise output expectations
• Increase competition

So the future might mean:
• Smaller teams doing bigger things
• Faster iteration cycles
• Less tolerance for slow manual workflows

4. The ecosystem builds around it

If something becomes indispensable, companies start:
• Building internal tooling around it
• Creating standards for usage
• Integrating it into CI/CD, docs, knowledge bases

That’s when you know it’s not hype anymore — it’s plumbing.

⸻

Let me ask you this though — when you heard that phrase, did it sound exciting to you… or slightly unsettling?

Because “indispensable” can feel empowering (we’re leveling up) or ominous (we’re becoming dependent). The emotional reaction matters.

[flyingpylon]