AI is turning us into glue

Summary

AI is turning us into glue 2025-04-18 Not like that, probably. I'm trying to learn to stop worrying and love the AGI, but I'm feeling pretty bleak about it. I make software as my day job, and like basically everyone I know at this point, I've used LLMs to get some stuff done faster. o3 came out yesterday, and already it's helped me get to the bottom of a thorny bug, with a lot less trial and error than I would've needed otherwise. On its face, this is a good thing. So what's the problem? Well, I like fixing thorny bugs! They're puzzles, and digging into them lets me learn about parts of the computer I usually don’t see. Same goes for refactoring--when I'm doing it right, I'm understanding the shape of my system better, and crystallizing that into a structure that expresses it. Solving these puzzles scratches an itch in my brain. I'm not sure it's the most rewarding part of my job, but it is the part I most enjoy. I don't think we're quite there yet, but the writing is on the wall: very conservatively, within ten years, I'll be inferior to the computer at doing most tasks roughly shaped like "deep linear thinking about a concrete problem". When you excise that role from this work, you're left with two chunks that are mostly nonadjacent. There's ship-steering, and there's plumbing (forgive the mixed metaphors, here and throughout). When I hear from people who are excited about an AI-empowered future, they're universally talking about the former. The promise of vibe coding is that you only need to care about the top layer of the work--bring your sensibilities (idea / design / ethos) to the table, and the machine will do the rest for you. The human is freed to do the human work. I've got a few ideas, and I can almost talk myself into liking that world. But in my experience, it's just not the full story for anything at all sophisticated. For one, even when using an agent with tools, there are issues that a human can see that the system cannot. If I'm building a web appli...