Jared Diamond explores this in his book Collapse.

The core idea being that each time humanity was going to exceed the carrying capacity of its environment, we invented a new technology which increased the headroom. Obviously this ratchet only goes in one direction. The only way to go backwards is collapse.

But... It's worked so far?

Without them then you wouldn't have strength, confidence or motivation and you wouldn't power through life. But you might be just as happy?

That backward kink between the head tube and the front forks would make the pelican's job of keeping the bike upright extremely difficult though.

LOL. Pelicans may be a solved problem, but being a former Bike Person, I can assure you that bikes never will be.

Or "will need fixing", right?

Remembr when it was missng lettrs out of wrds

miss.ng lett.rs

Yeah it tells you nothing of value. It's the Recency Bias taken to its ultimate conclusion isn't it. Anything I learned about AI I learned in the last few months but somehow that's as important as all the experience of my decades long software career? Come on.

It signals you don't have enough time or will to chase the latest stuff, otherwise you would have learned it with other cool kids half a year earlier. It carries some signal, but I would not choose based on this alone. I would even consider selecting against this to a certain point, but I also work in a place that COBOL on a mainframe. YMMV.

> I would even consider selecting against this to a certain point

I agree. A technology professional who views themselves as "one of the cool kids" (read: easily manipulated by social media) is a legitimate security threat, as are many of the popularly promoted approaches to "LLM-assisted software developement".

I haven't considered looking at it from the security thread angle. Can you expand on this?

Somebody at $formerwork wrote a "skill" that takes a poorly/briefly specified Jira ticket, and "fleshes it out", purportedly so that when an agent picks up the ticket it has more context.

Really at that point, with head in hands, rather than try to explain the foolishness, I decided I was better out.

"Zoom and enhance" used to be a joke/meme, apparently it's now "engineering".

I agree.

My guess is the author either

1. Deliberately used LLM tics in their prose, for artistic and provocative reasons, or 2. Used AI

It's quite interesting to reflect on.

Today is August 4, 2026

I'm REALLY REALLY not enjoying this current middle ground where we may be on the cusp of LLMs writing all code better than I could OR we may be on the cusp of realising that this is a chimera.

Mostly I just want to skip forward to the point where we find out which track we're on, because until we know, I feel constantly tense.