You will get laid off but you won't if you create value and you will create value if you don't care about money and it will go recursive but it won't go recursive because there are limits. It won't change anything but it will change everything.
No one knows what he is actually saying (see comments) but at least he managed to compress the entire discourse on AI impact into a blog post.
This is a trap for engineers.
If you don't worry about the returns, you won't get any.
There are circumstances where that is fine. Be sure you're in one of them first.
> Always has been, and if you paid attention in CS class, you know the limits of those things.
I don't remember ever learning a theorem stating that computers cannot surpass humans.
Engineers are running 8 instances of Claude Code at once. That doesn't mean they are completing work 8x faster.
If you must hold the context for 8 agents in your head at once, your expertise as an engineer is wasted.
See https://emsh.cat/one-human-one-agent-one-browser/ - One man + one agent in 72 hours, did better than thousands of agents over weeks.
Staying focused on one or two important tasks still works. You won't fall behind.
It's easy to create value for others and not worry about returns when you have enough money to not worry.
Unfortunately for most people, there's plenty of companies willing to take the returns and leave you paycheck to paycheck. That's literally what they are optimized to do.
I don't even disagree with the ideal, but I think a prerequisite step to this philosophy is UBI.
The world very much is a Red Queen Race if your country has a program to import Indian tech workers. The only way to leave the Red Queen race in such countries is to abandon your career field and work in food service or retail instead.
People keep rediscovering the Bhagavad Gita in new ways
Even if your goal is to go out and create value for others, your contribution is proportional to what everyone else can offer. If others with AI will deliver that value cheaper, or if what I am good at can be easily automated, it's getting harder and harder to deliver more value than I consume.
Just join the right "communities" or else it might have very different results. A toxic community can exploit you (even if you make more value than you consume).
I think the idea is that in the future, everyone will need a philosophy degree to go along with whatever business they will work in. It’s no longer going to be about “I know this skill, tell me what you want me to do,” but will be about “I know how we can solve these problems with this skill.”
If that stops being the limiting factor, then we’ll be in a post-scarcity world.
> The trick is not to play zero sum games. This is what I have been saying the whole time. Go create value for others and don’t worry about the returns.
This strategy is highly effective but it's also difficult to tolerate as an ordinary advanced ape. Watching others play less noble games and obtain easier wins can be discouraging over time.
I have found that the less you care about money the easier it is to acquire. Risk aversion, greed and interpersonal drama will kill a good idea way before anything else. I sometimes like to reframe this one as "100% of $0 is still $0".
This post feels a bit ideological in nature. There are recurring processes at organizations to assess someone's fit in a given role. Generally when someone is no longer performing as expected, they're given time to correct their ways or retrain. If the organization has no system in place, then it really falls on the organization. I wonder if the author overestimates the amount of people who really want to be in a role they're not good at.
I like reading optimistic posts and I hadn't hear the term Red Queens Race before. Now I understand it comes from Alice In Wonderland while she runs but never moves. The whole website has great little thought snippets. The author is upfront about repeating themselves. That's great, so do I.
I don’t quite get the amount of supposed subtext that others see in this piece, so the flippant attitudes here are off putting. Geohotz has already commented here that people are putting words into his mouth.
I agree with what is being said: AI will consolidate otherwise nonsensical jobs/roles/companies into fewer (probably more profitable?) ones, so if there’s a time to jump ship from one of these (assuming worst case scenarios), do it while you’re employed and you can land somewhere else that’s hopefully more stable.
This to me is a fairly no-nonsense piece over all. AI itself and tools like LLM are damn good though, limitations aside. We get to do a lot of things we haven’t had time to do before.
To refer back to the trite business book section - making something new is a Blue Ocean Strategy approach. Fighting for existing market share is a bloodied Red Ocean approach that Thiel called “competition is for losers”. So both benevolent and be greedy approaches recommend the same. Make a new puddle for everyone to swim in and you can focus on empathy instead of defense.
> it will continue to improve, but it won’t “go recursive” or whatever the claim is. It’s always been recursive.
I suspect "going recursive" often colloquially means that AI systems achieve their exponential growth without human software engineers in the mix. This is a moment whose sudden apparent nearness does justify some of the ramping rhetoric, in my opinion.
This is exactly what manipulators/value extractors want you to think.
Case in point: how many here have heard of Mick Ronson?
Few perhaps. However most have heard of David Bowie.
See, Ronson was silently creating value for Bowie. Didn’t even get credited although songs like Life On Mars are what they are thanks to his contribution.
Mick was creating value while everyone one else was getting rich.
There are zero-sum games you can't realistically escape. They're really common. Credentials is a zero-sum game. Political power, influence of all sorts, are zero sum games: if you have more of it, someone else has less. Land ownership is basically zero sum, too.
That was my contracting philosophy for 15 years.
Create more value than what I cost, otherwise why are you paying me?
The whole world is obsessed with openclaw. Some companies are now even evaluating their employees' built agents, the tokens consumed, and the money spent on AI. It's really gotten out of hand.
Lol AI is not search. I will never wrap my head around the pessimism of AI on HN
> The trick is not to play zero sum games. This is what I have been saying the whole time. Go create value for others and don’t worry about the returns. If you create more value than you consume, you are welcome in any well operating community.
Reminds me of Manfred Macx' attitude in the novel Accelerando by Charlie Stross
> That said, if you have a job where you create complexity for others, you will be found out.
Anybody have examples?
> if you have a job where you create complexity for others, you will be found out
This explains the panic. It describes most roles in big tech.
Well, it must all start with a precise definition of "value" first, and then proceed to propose a method of lossless conversion of different kinds of values. Is a bottle of water less valueable in a desert than a luxury sedan?
As others have said, it's a very optimistic view that can be infuriating to read when you are struggling to pay your bills.
I'd also argue it's not very effecicient : we are at our best when we have deadlines and clear targets to reach, and making money to pay the bills can be a very motivating one to stop procrastinating !
Non-attachment to outcomes has always been one of the cornerstones of life.
It's better to be a happy optimist than a smart pessimist.
Literally everyone working for a wage is creating more value for others than they consume. The problem is the rent seekers are capturing that value. This is a crucial part geohot is missing. What people often don't think about and they should is that when you are employed for a wage by someone, you are the creditor and the employer is the debtor. Why? Because you work for say 2 weeks, and THEN they pay you. That whole time working you are crediting the employer and they are in debt to YOU. Think about how crazy this is. You the creditor must do what your debtor tells you. Maybe we don't think about it because it's too painful.
The surest recipe to becoming a sucker and being left with nothing is leaving ownership and properly valuing your contributions to chance rather than respecting essential details. Anyone advising others they should just shrug and ignore it is either a moron or trying to play them.
Workers should generally aim to unionize and seek to capture more of their value through worker-owned co-ops.
Can anyone explain the rent seeker paragraph? Which companies are playing 0 sum game and which are not? Are all big players not rent seekers?
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All these feel good articles are very ideal in nature, I feel. Not to be the doomsayer, but without a solid backup of resources (be it money, power or some such thing), I find it hard to imagine to be this 'careless' towards returns. World indeed feels like a Red Queen race.
I'd read several other posts and had a similar conclusion.
couldnt agree more with the author! just will try "If you create more value than you consume, you are welcome in any well operating community." to be "equal value"
Most of what's getting "automated" was never really work, it was headcount that existed because nobody had a good reason to cut it yet. AI gave the reason..
"There’s people who built billion dollars companies by orchestrating 37 agents this morning AND YOU JUST SAT THERE AND ATE BREAKFAST LIKE A PLEB!"
In Europe we like to sit there and eat breakfast like a pleb. After enjoying that, we build a million Euros company. Maybe or maybe not. Who cares if the breakfast is good.
I've always found something profoundly deceiving about all these "just create value posts", as if absolutely everyone could simply by some hard work actually create significant value for others.
The barrier to being able to add any value along the supply chain is shriking daily, meaning that very few people can actually add value.
The people that have managed to get on top of the system by these mean rarely aknowledge that their methods don't scale, which is a terribly irresponsible and ultimately narcissistic way to use their ideological influence.
If you give advice to a group, it should either scale to most of the group or aknowledge up front it's exceptionalistic.
> They just say it’s AI cause that makes the stock price go up.
slightly naive take when the author recognises that AI will cause productivity increase.
even thoses replies create common value.
Tomorow datasets.
Keep publishing !
The obligatory reality check:
The rest of the comments here are really not passing the vibe check, but I’m glad to see a post like this. The message is true not just in AI or software dev but across all aspects of life. Give more than you take. Provide value.
Two things.
> If you don’t use this new stupid AI thing you will fall behind. If you haven’t totally updated your workflow you are worth 0.
When I see this on any social platform, that is a sign that a VC / investor already invested or likely over-invested in said product and is manipulating emotions to shill their portfolio companies.
This is a tired tactic repeated and recycled tens of thousands of times over and over again and the first sense is to ignore them.
> That said, if you have a job where you create complexity for others, you will be found out. The days of rent seekers are coming to an end. But not because there will be no more rent seeking, it’s because rent seeking is a 0 sum game and you will lose at it to bigger players.
This is why many here are realizing the uncomfortable truth about why complexity over simplicity was celebrated. Of course job security.
But it turns out that the low hanging fruit at those companies that added close to no value LLMs were enough to achieve "AGI" internally; (meaning layoffs in this case).
The jobs of knowledge workers will still be there, but the big money just went into data centers (and not overpaying for more knowledge workers).
The truth is in the middle.
You only have to look at ai slop taking over to see that what most people value is stupid.
A better mantra is to create value for yourself and then compound it by sharing it. Then you can't lose, yet can win even more.
Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness.
All can know good as good only because there is evil.
Therefore having and not having arise together.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short contrast each other:
High and low rest upon each other;
Voice and sound harmonize each other;
Front and back follow one another.
Therefore the sage goes about doing nothing, teaching no-talking.
The ten thousand things rise and fall without cease,
Creating, yet not possessing.
Working, yet not taking credit.
Work is done, then forgotten.
Therefore it lasts forever.
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Why does HN take this guy seriously? OK, he got pacman running on a PS3. Great. Remember the time he stood up on a stage discussing the path to Level 5 autonomous driving? Comma.ai actually produces a barely-adequate lane keeping system for obsolete cars. Remember fixing Twitter search in 12 weeks? This guy is a total charlatan.
On the question of whether Hotz knows what AI can or cannot do, the answer is demonstrably "no".
> Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
What counts as a return is quite subjective — it goes beyond money. Respect, happiness, meaning — all of these count.
Given that, if there are no returns at all, I bet that is not a positive-sum game that could last long. Like if you give and create value for others, but the recipient has no respect for you and you receive nothing — it is not meaningful and will not last long. And you'd better walk away and start worrying about the returns.
And to be frank, look at who creates the most value in the world — they also could be the richest. That is no coincidence. Take Elon Musk — tremendous positive-sum deals with people everywhere, and all together, that's what got him to the top.
Kudos to all the entrepreneurs who work hard and create deal opportunities that could make everyone win.
This post absolutely reeks with the privilege of wealth. For the vast majority of people on this earth, the "Returns" from their labor matter a lot more to them than some vaunted, abstract ideals, as those ideals won't put food on the table or a roof over their children's heads.
The bottom line is that the majority of people alive today have to take whatever deal they are given in a sense, as they absolutely do not have the "Luxury" of not "Playing zero sum games."
Must be nice to be rich enough to get to spout philosophical BS and not worry how you're going to pay for groceries, but most people alive these days are a lot closer to being homeless than they are to being millionaires, and quitting a job that pays their bills so they can "Provide value to a community" and not worry about how they are going to get paid just isn't even a remotely viable option.
Great advice if you want to be old and poor. Yes, there's a chance it works out because you're that good, but there's a chance it doesn't. This doesn't mean do the opposite and only worry about your returns, but strike a balance. The world we live in is not in general a bunch of isolated people in a meritocracy, connections and relationships within your workplace play a huge role. Politics exist. I know a lot of asshats that are highly successful even though pretty useless. Don't be that person, but don't be there for everyone and empty handed in the end.
Better advice would be stay hungry, stay curious, keep learning.
> "The trick is not to play zero sum games."
To be mean, I’d say no—those zero-sum games are always 'positive' for the players, because the people actually foot pay the bill aren't even at the table.
Come on, we live in a globalized reality. Those insulated by the 'Dollar Illusion' don’t even realize that the true costs are being extracted from the rest of the world. These so-called zero-sum games are nothing but a sophisticated machinery of power, meticulously designed to obfuscate the truth.
But those words are just too cynical; it doesn't really make any sense.
> This is what I have been saying the whole time. Go create value for others and don’t worry about the returns.
No. This is the time to abandon naive dogooderism.
The capitalists said that they don’t need labor any more. Fine. Prepare for that potentiality by not giving jack shit away for free. That includes permissively licensed open source software. But it goes way beyond that.
In the long term maybe we can get rid of the labor-employee relation so that people who do honest work don’t have to worry about their work becoming automated. Let the ones who engage in dishonest pseudo-work (capital accumulation) worry about their pseudo-productivity becoming null and void.
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This reads as a typical anti hype article that attracts the people that are fed up with reality. But this framework never works because it's detached from current reality. AI is a big thing and it will eat most jobs weather you call it stupid or you like it.
I didn't get a career/skillset for the aesthetics. Sounds like Communism, rabble rabble. Or a cult.
Is this effective_altruism.jpg?
Hack, actor, liar, influencer. You might as well share that LeGate kid
karpathy, geohot, william legate, any other "developer influencers" i need to avoid?
As is often the case, the title is a bit misleading and implies a universality that I don’t think the author intended.
He is specifically talking about AI, and saying (in my understanding) that you shouldn’t worry too much about whether your specific thing will be overwritten by AI, as long as you focus on actually creating true, real value with your work.
I agree with that completely and can see it happening in my own field (marketing/tech writing.)
Yes, theoretically AI can replace every writer and marketer. The functionality is there.
No, this isn’t actually happening, because what’s mattered all along isn’t a generic marketing skill set; but the mental effort to actually provide value. No one wants to read a blog post by an AI because it’s boring, and the writers that actually have something of value in their writing are doing just fine.