This industry has devolved into a circus.
Some mistakes you might be making:
Your effort level is too high
Your skills are too long
You're not aligning before you start work
You're aligning too often, and too hard
Your automated checks are too lax
Your custom tooling is too token-inefficient
You aren't doing enough automated review
You aren't reviewing previous coding sessions (with an agent)
You're doing too much human review
You aren't vibe coding enough prototypes
Your agent can't verify its own work
You're babysitting the agent too much
You've overloaded your global steering files
Your codebase is hard to navigate
You aren't building a shared language
Your codebase architecture allows bad tests to be written
You aren't thinking strategically enough
You aren't thinking enough
James High retweeted
the bottom line is that there simply aren’t enough resources for ubiquitous AI driven software development. unless you are getting unlimited tokens from your employer’s own datacentres you have a responsibility to continue to own the software and be prepared for token scarcity.
also, this caveat every single “don’t read the code” advocate adds (“except for mission critical code”) is bullshit.
everything commercial is critical within its own sphere. be it the trust and reliability expected from customers, or the owners’ expectation that software professionals execute responsible stewardship while also delivering of business need.
this is true for the one-person business that pays the mortgage and feeds the family right up to the multinational that runs numbers for insurance underwriters.
James High retweeted
To double by 2035 in nominal terms, US GDP needs to grow on average 8%/y. So far this year, we are tracking some 6.3% NGDP growth while real GDP is only growing 2.2% so most of the contributor is inflation.
It seems implausible that for at least the first 3-4 years that inflation doesn’t track higher with nominal GDP in an inflationary growth environment even if the adoption of AI incl robotics eventually does deliver strong disinflation/deflation on the back half of it.
I think @dylan522p has predicted that in 2028 the US economy could grow 8% nominal with 4% real and 4% inflation. That seems optimistically plausible if we don’t get an inflationary spiral. But now imagine the scenario in which inflation is still 4% in 2028 and we haven’t had recession in between, that means that inflation likely will have hovered around 3-4% for the next 3 years. What is the Fed supposed to have done in this whole time?
Unless the Fed intentionally declares a formal outright abandonment of its 2% inflation target, it’s hard to imagine that in the face of persistent inflation above 2% traveling in the wrong direction that the Fed doesn’t again declare war on inflation and go on an aggressive hiking cycle like it did in 2022 such that the target terminal rate would be whatever it takes to slow down the economy. In this scenario, if it’s to be believed, AI becomes a direct enemy of the Fed’s inflation target. Either the US abandons inflation targets and supports AI at all costs or stops/slows AI development in order to combat inflation.
Fwiw, the bond market doesn’t seem to believe at all that AI will deliver meaningful increases to US GDP growth. At a yield of 5.3%, the 10y US Treasury bond is roughly consistent with 2.5-3% real GDP growth and 3% inflation over the next 10 years even if the risk premium was zero. This is clearly not consistent with 4% RDGP+4% inflation. The Occam’s razor is that the bond market is pricing a boom and then a bust in the style of DotCom.
Now, a question for the AGI visionaries, which industries are the likeliest sources of significant contributors to GDP going forward? The often cited industries that use a lot of AI to improve productitivity have been elite financial hedge funds like Jane Street and large pharmaceutical companies that use AI for drug discovery etc.
The trouble with these examples is that the pyramid’s base gets narrower as we approach the top. There are only so many Jane Streets in the world, leaving aside the fact that HFs are inherently zero-sum and JS will look for cheaper AI models/solutions over time. It’s also hard to imagine that pharma cos spending all of their FCFs on AI tokens. Ultimately to grow GDP, we need to just produce a lot more “stuff”. If AI drugs can lengthen lifespans, maybe that becomes a source of output. But AI is also supposed to make human workers less valuable as an input?
Would love to see how maths on the macro on this. This is typically an unfair question to ask of technologists. But AI capex is so huge and the so far elusive ROI at the macro aggregate level just needs to manifest in percents of GDP growth starting basically now. That’s why so many AI researchers are making macro forecasts now I think.,
Anthropic's Sholto Douglas says AI capex could rise from $1 trillion this year to $4 trillion in 2028 and begin doubling humanity’s GDP by the early 2030s
“Over the course of the last four or five years, we’ve been 2x-ing or 3x-ing the amount of compute capacity devoted to AI every year."
"And so I think that’s roughly, together, the hyperscalers are spending about a trillion dollars this year on capex related to AI. A very interesting question will be, will that trend line hold, and so will it go to $2 trillion next year and then $4 trillion in 2028?"
"And if that trend line broadly holds, and you can expand that to encompass the broader robotics industry, then that means that in the early 2030s, you start to get to the point where you’re actually effectively doubling the GDP of humanity, which, again, is a little bit of a ridiculous concept, but requires a lot of things to go right.”
James High retweeted
Insulin Pumps
Pacemakers
Airbag Deployment
Smoke Alarms
Elevators
Anti Lock Brakes
Lithium Battery Controller
Safety Critical Aircraft Code
Pressure Cookers
Power Steering
Treadmill Saftey
CPAP Machines
Defibrillators
3D Printers
Railroad Crossings
Nuclear Reactor SCRAM Logic
Literally anything PLC
gotta disagree on this take. tiny code often the most important
James High retweeted
I'm having a hard time accepting messages from people with unlimited AI budgets telling folks at much smaller businesses that 'coding is dead'
Once upon a time, we used to throttle network connections to test how websites worked on a slow connection
Try using a $10 plan in October. AI products change DRAMATICALLY when you have a budget
James High retweeted
Tangentially: the only reason OP is able to "stop looking at assembly" is because a bunch of other people still do. There are compiler codegen bugs constantly, but OP never knows about them because other people who do read ASM find, report and/or fix them before they cause too many downstream problems.
Another way to say this is that the "compiler" does not "get it right". A ton of people, constantly reading the ASM that the compiler outputs, work together to "get it right".... eventually :)
So the proper way to look at this is, if you've stopped reading ASM, that's not because codegen was solved, but rather that you have implicitly decided to outsource to other people the problem of keeping codegen working reliably.
James High retweeted
Related: Casey (@OntologyExplained) and Carl (@InternetOfBugs) perfectly break down and reframe that iffy "OpenAI hacking Hugging Face" story. A must watch/listen. youtu.be/jIlm8O78M2c
James High retweeted
One of the worlds largest tech cos casually admitting the technology we’re spending $1 trillion annually on might in fact be counterproductive, and will need human oversight every step of the way
File this one in the “what were the signs?” folder
James High retweeted
🚨Michael Burry just said Elon Musk and Nvidia's deal is built on fake numbers.
Burry published a detailed breakdown calling the entire structure "Fugazi", his word for fake.
He is alleging that billions of dollars in Nvidia chips are being hidden off balance sheets, and that American retirees are unknowingly funding the whole thing.
Nvidia, the world's largest AI chip company sold $5.4 billion worth of its most advanced GPUs, the GB200, to a company called Valor.
Valor is not a real operating business. It is a special purpose vehicle, a shell company created specifically to hold these chips and nothing else. Nvidia also invested $1.9 billion of its own money directly into Valor on top of the sale.
Those 100,000+ chips are now physically inside xAI's data center. xAI is Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, the one that builds Grok. xAI is using every single one of those chips right now to run its AI models.
But here is what Burry is flagging.
Neither Nvidia nor xAI owns those chips on paper. Valor, the shell company holds legal title. That means $5.4 billion in GPU assets do not show up on Nvidia's balance sheet as inventory.
They do not show up on xAI's balance sheet as assets. They are legally invisible to both companies.
Nvidia gets to book the $5.4 billion as a completed sale and record it as revenue. xAI gets full use of the chips without owning them. And the risk disappears into a shell company in the middle.
Now here is where American retirees enter the picture.
Valor needed $3.5 billion in debt to fund this structure. Apollo provided it. Apollo is one of the largest asset managers on earth with $1.03 trillion under management and $834 billion specifically in private credit.
Apollo raised the $3.5 billion, packaged it into debt securities, and sold those securities to Athene.
Athene is Apollo's own insurance company. It sells fixed and indexed annuities, retirement savings products, to ordinary Americans.
When a retiree buys an Athene annuity, they believe their money is sitting in safe, stable investments. That money is now inside a structure funding Elon Musk's AI data center.
The numbers inside Athene are most alarming.
Athene holds $74.2 billion in reserves. It has moved $217 billion in assets into a captive insurer based in Bermuda, meaning those assets sit outside normal US insurance regulation and oversight.
Of the entire portfolio, 34.7%, equal to $103 billion, is classified as Level 3 assets.
Level 3 is an accounting classification that means there is no observable market price for these assets. No outside party can independently verify what they are actually worth.
The leverage sitting on top of those unpriced assets is 16 times.
Burry's says:
Every step of this structure is technically legal and publicly disclosed. But the entire thing was deliberately engineered across 8 to 12 steps to move credit risk off balance sheets and away from any market pricing.
- Nvidia books the revenue.
- Apollo collects the fees.
- xAI gets the computing power.
- And retirees sitting at the bottom of a 16x leveraged Bermuda insurance structure, holding $103 billion in assets with no market price carry the risk without knowing it exists.
@madskristensen Have you seen a regression in latest VS2026 18.5.2, where ALT+Up/Down on a multiple line selection only moves the selected lines once then loses the selection entirely? Not a keybinding issue.
James High retweeted
What if the whole LLM thing is a false start? If the flaws are inherent systemic problems - if the compounding of hallucinations/errors can't be sorted out? If the capex build out is one of the biggest misallocations of capital ever? Then what? bloomberg.com/news/newslette…
The tech press and financial analysts needs to do much better job of calling out the AI washing these companies are doing. They are being upstaged by a hedgehog.
🦔 Meta is planning layoffs that could affect 20% or more of the company, according to Reuters. No date has been set and the magnitude isn't finalized, but top executives have told senior leaders to begin planning how to pare back. Meta employed nearly 79,000 people as of December. The company says it's speculative reporting about theoretical approaches. Meanwhile, Meta plans to invest $600 billion in data centers by 2028, just acquired Moltbook, and is spending at least $2 billion on Chinese AI startup Manus.
My Take
The math here is something. Meta is cutting potentially 20% of its workforce to offset costly AI infrastructure bets while simultaneously spending $600 billion on data centers and billions more on AI acquisitions. Zuckerberg says he's seeing projects that used to require big teams now accomplished by a single talented person, but their Llama 4 models had setbacks last year and their new Avocado model is reportedly lagging expectations. So they're laying off people to fund AI that isn't working as well as they hoped.
I keep seeing this same move across tech. Amazon cut 16,000 jobs in January. Block cut nearly half its staff with Dorsey pointing to AI efficiency. The framing is always that AI will let them do more with less, but I think what's actually happening is simpler. These companies over-hired during COVID and low interest rates, now they need to cut costs, and AI gives them cover to do it without admitting the over-hiring was bad management. Meta's core business is still a money printer. The layoffs aren't because Facebook stopped being profitable. They're because Zuckerberg wants to spend $600 billion chasing something that hasn't delivered yet.
Hedgie🤗
The business model is to create token addicts who can’t function without AI by offering heavily subsidized and unsustainable subscription pricing before the VC money dries up.
James High retweeted
Tim Walz: Donald Trump "crossed a line" with threat to use military on "enemy from within" trib.al/vdJVfES
James High retweeted
Am I the only one who thinks Donald Trump calling for televised military tribunals for his political opponents should have been a lead story on the news at least equivalent to Biden's failed debate performance?
ALT Disgraced twice-impeached four times-indicted convicted felon and adjudicated rapist Donald Trump at his Bedminster golf club where his first wife and mother of his three oldest children is buried on the green.
ALT Liz Cheney, former congresswoman and number 3 in the Republican party House leadership who was chosen by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to be on the January 6 Committee where she was vice-chair. Donald Trump targeted her in her re-election bid by supporting her being primaried.
James High retweeted
Dear New York Times editorial board,
Did I miss your 2024 piece requesting Donald Trump drop out of the Presidential race after multiple convictions and multiple women saying he assaulted them or after January 6 or after dozens and dozens of other horrors?
