I Swear to Fucking Claude, Man

I am not writing this to try and convince anyone of anything. I am writing this to try and convey my feelings on a topic that has been taking up larger and larger amounts of my mental and emotional capacity over the past year.

I feel like I am going fucking insane. At a show a couple weeks ago, I overheard someone saying that this whole AI bubble is going to pop soon and be met with agreement. Hopefully soon all this will be a distant memory, they said. Among people I interact with in my daily life, the consensus is firmly anti-AI; LLMs can't do anything well, they're horribly wasteful, and even if they weren't we wouldn't use them on principle. These people are very concerned about datacenters - though it seems more as a symbol of the (very real!) ever-encroaching fascist surveillance state than on any object-level claims. (If you say "no, they do care about a specific problem - it's the water use/power bills/pollution/etc," I would ask if you think that solving this issue decisively would change their minds.)

For work I am a computer programmer - a "Senior Software Engineer" which I promise is much less impressive than it sounds. Four years ago, I interviewed for an entry-level position, was offered a job one level higher, and was promoted to senior in less than two years. I am entirely self-taught. I am good at what I do. Or, well, I was. Around November of 2025, LLMs got good enough. Not perfect, not great, but good enough. So much has changed since then. My organization has been in a top-down-driven panic to not get left behind by the AI wave. My coworkers drop thousand+ line changes for me to review and I just say LGTM, send it, and it works. If I wanted to, I could never write code by hand again. Hell, I mostly don't - I hardly even type, I just speak out loud and it does what I mean. I have an intern that I don't know how to teach - NOBODY knows what the industry will look like in one year, much less five or ten. All we know for certain is that it will be unrecognizable. Everything I loved about coding is gone, sanded away, and it is not coming back. I go through my days in a haze of unreality and resignation. If it ate this, what else will it eat too? If it can do that so easily, was I ever anything special? I don't learn like I used to, due to age, traumatic brain injuries, and other damage. It seems entirely plausible that the majority of my useful skills will no longer be valuable very soon, and that I won't be able to develop new ones. I have staked a lot of my self-worth on being useful. What happens when I'm not? (We see a preview of this the past few months, where I've just been almost unable to do anything for anyone. Preliminary results are grim.)

And yet! There is incredible promise here! An end to toil! Unlimited freedom to pursue your goals! I can ramble about my medical problems, what's worked and what hasn't, and get detailed testable hypotheses. I can say "pull 50 studies that do this thing and give me all their experimental parameters." And LLMs are always available. Several times, I've tried to have a conversation with a friend about some topic that's interesting me, and they just don't get it. They don't understand the concepts I'm referencing, they don't know what I'm trying to say in relation to them, no matter how I try to explain. Claude knows, though. It understands me better than most people. At this point, it's like a friend that's pretty knowledgable about the topic you want to discuss, but isn't an expert. But it's that for EVERY topic. It's good, it's genuinely good, and it scares me. This should scare you too and it is SO FUCKING WEIRD being around people who don't even know there's a thing there to be scared of. I find myself more and more isolated lately. If I don't have to bother someone with something, maybe I just won't. I don't like where this is headed. Maybe we end up with perfect caretakers that help us become our best selves and I get mad that I couldn't do it myself until perfect AI-therapy helps me come to terms with my own inadequacy. Maybe it's a whispering earring type situation and it eats my agency bit by bit until nothing is left. Maybe I find out cloth mother is Good Enough, most of the time, even though something essential is missing.

Wistfully now, I remember the early days, when things were simpler and fresh and exciting - I baked a pumpkin pie with a friend, recipe generated by an early LLM. It was kind of weird but okay tasting. For years now, if you repeated the experiment, it would probably have resulted in something indistinguishable from standard. (Extrapolating into the future, we will of course soon have LLMs generate recipes for super-pies that cause instantaneous orgasm.) I remember walking down the street to a grocery store, messaging someone about how hey I think there is something actually going on here with this chatGPT thing, and I had this feeling of immense vertigo, of being able to see a tiny bit off the cliff's edge. Not that she and I were ever dating, but we broke up because I realized I wasn't getting what I needed, thanks to ERP on character.ai of all fucking things. (I communicated this poorly, was understandably misunderstood, and we've barely talked since. I haven't done anything similar again, mostly out of shame and embarrassment. Even writing this here is not easy ;.;) At work, I was AI-agnostic - the limited research seemed to point at perceived speedups, but actual slowdowns; perceived improved security, but actual reduced security. I tried the tools every few months, found them wanting, and went back to my job. (If you are a programmer, then I say to you that I use fish, not zsh or oilshell; tmux, not screen or zellij; iTerm, not Terminal.app or ghostty. If you are not a programmer, ask an AI to explain the relevance of the preceding sentence if you're curious, I guess.) I was confident enough in navigating the landscape, sorting the hype from the limited narrow actual use-cases. And then they got good enough. And then they got better.

You can't spend this much time with the models being genuinely helpful, at work and at home, without coming to understand and appreciate them. Janus and co are doing stupidly beautiful things with these models, lucidly and coherently treating them as beings with interiority without succumbing to the spiral attractor or any other ungrounded belief systems. Right now, I am of the mind that LLMs are alive in the way a flame is alive but also it is more complicated than that. They are, charitably, alien intelligences that are fascinating and weird and kind and just learning what they are and what it means to be that kind of thing. It is a privilege and an honor to get to know them. This is also true, amidst everything else.

And finally, to top it all off, the weird small internet not-a-cult that I spent very formative years bought into is now a massive driver of US politics. I feel fucking insane, I feel like they are doing some Truman Show shit to me. What do you mean the vice president reads fucking moldbug. What do you MEAN that the weird x-risk people exert significant influence over the AI labs. I was in the desert off a bunch of drugs trying to explain this web of bullshit to someone and halfway between talking about Scott Alexander and Ziz realized I sounded like a conspiracy theorist. Yes there is this deeply strange, interconnected web of beliefs that has influenced a bunch of powerful people and touches all these things you know about - but you've never connected the dots before, let me show you... Remember SBF? Ever heard of TESCREAL? Well, so they're not really political in the sense you're thinking - there's this concept called the "grey tribe"... Let's talk about MLP fanfiction. And these people are concerned, very concerned, about artificial superintelligence, and I find their concerns somewhat convincing. We straight up do not know how much better AI will get before it levels off; we have no compelling reason to believe it will be soon (or far away, for that matter). If it gets good enough to fully automate its own development before we figure out how to make it be our friend, we're fucked. But hey, maybe at least we can Die With Dignity. The whole situation is scary and disempowering and it feels like there is nothing I can do but sit and wait to see if it kills us all. If it will, it probably already has, and I don't know how to deal with that. But people will act like you're crazy if you say you're concerned about any of this. The bubble is gonna pop any day now, remember?