That’s the opposite of my experience. Weird. But I’m also not the kind of person who gets hung up on whether someone used a loop or recursion or if their methods are five times as long as what I would’ve done myself unless there is a performance impact that matters to me as a user. But I’m also the kind of person who doesn’t get paid by the hour to write programs. I use programs in the service of other paid work.

The tariffs are a bit of a new phenomenon so I think that may be motivated reasoning. Construction productivity has also been stagnant for about 60 years. I think the most important factor is that housing prices, in the United States at least, are governed by how much a bank will lend. Very small but affordable houses will never be built because a bank will not finance a $10,000 loan over 30 years. In the same vein, it’s technically feasible for automobiles to be built for just a few thousand dollars, but, again, they will not finance $2500 over five years. So cars and houses are just built to the price point which will satisfy the lenders. You may not hate financialization nearly as much as it deserves.

OK, let me fall less short. It has replaced the freelancer for me. I communicate product requirements. It builds the product immediately at trivial cost. It’s better than a human. There are jobs I would have considered hiring out that I don’t because the machine is better. Nothing you said about labor effects in the large even logically follow. Have you even used one of these systems?

I really don’t agree with the author here. Perplexity has, for me, largely replaced Cal Newport’s job (read other journalists work and synthesize celebrity and pundit takes on topic X). I think the take that Claude isn’t literally a human so agents failed is silly and a sign of motivated reasoning. Business processes are going to lag the cutting edge by years in any conditions and by generations if there is no market pressure. But Codex isn’t capable of doing a substantial portion of what I would have had to pay a freelancer/consultant to do? Any LLM can’t replace a writer for a content mill? Nonsense. Newport needs to open his eyes and think harder about how a journalist can deliver value in the emerging market.

There is no simple explanation, but an important issue is that there is no price discovery mechanism or system pressure for efficiency. You also may not know that the US healthcare system is also an elaborate jobs program. Walk into any hospital and you will see 5-10 mostly young women doing basically nothing. I don’t know why the powers that be decided that the US should divest itself from any useful work, but here we are. Now we’re a couple generations into this social experiment by “smart” billionaires and their courtiers, and the military industrial complex is begging the Taiwanese to hold our soft hands and teach a blossoming generation hipsters and resentful immigrants how to build the computers we invented. We had a good run, but we’re Rome circa. 400-500 AD. Don’t let the marketing in Venezuela fool you. I’m just hoping the robots give us a few more decades of working plumbing.