I'm working on an autonomous agent framework that is set up this way (along with full authz policy support via OPA, monitoring via OTel and a centralized tool gateway with CLI). https://github.com/sibyllinesoft/smith-core for the interested. It doesn't have the awesome power of a 30 year old meme like the OP but it makes up for it with care.
The thing blocking level 8 isn't the difficulty of orchestration, it's the cost of validation. The quality of your software is a function of the amount of time you've spent validating it, and if you produce 100x more code in a given time frame, that code is going to get 1/100th as much validation, and your product will be lower quality as a result.
The only currency in a world where AI does everything is your ability to get human attention. So from that perspective moltbook is a huge success.
If Mark hired these people to do anything other than viral marketing, i.e. if he thinks they're visionaries who are going to make amazing apps, he's deluded.
You can already see how the same thing has played out with computer games. With the modern engines such as Unity almost anyone can make a game. And almost everyone suffers.
And as a result there's now a million games most of which are poor quality asset flips. Everybody suffers, creators and consumers. Race to the bottom where the bottom has been reached. Prices are zero and earnings are zero.
If 15 years ago an indie game dev would allocate 80% to making the game and 20% to marketing etc. Today that will not get anything but it's much better to spend 20% on the game and 80% on the marketing, SEO optimization and attention harvesting. It's a shouting match where it's all about winning the shouting match not producing the best content.
There are millions of asset flips, but the top indie games have never been better. It’s hard for indie developers because there’s so much competition: you need to heavily promote a quality game only because there are so many other quality games.
Likewise these tools have enabled many more people to create vibe-coded slop, and may lead to more quality software (making it harder to stand out without marketing), but the best software will only get better.
The implication is that the gatekeeping has become marketing dollars, when it used to be skill at making a fun game. I don't think we're in a better situation today.
There are fun games that succeed without marketing, e.g. Balatro, and there are bad games that fail despite it, e.g. Highguard.
The reason that “skill at making a fun game” doesn’t guarantee success is because there are so many fun games. Much less, if at all, because there is so many slop.
I disagree that accessibility is a detractor here.
There's never been a better time to be an indie dev. I'd rather have 1/1000 indie games be awesome than being force fed whatever storefront disguised as a game 'AAA' publishers poop out every year.
Just look at how slay the spire is doing up against marathon right now. Which of those was shouting the loudest? Highguard anyone?
It is true that the indy game market is brutal but it's always been brutal.
You don't really hear about a crisis at the indy game level though, rather at the AAA game level there is much of "we'd like to use our market power to take out the risk in game development" and then years later we realize they took out all the value before they took out the risk and now they're doomed.
... I think he's got an affinity for other people and organizations that have succeeded in the same way. The idea that somebody out there might have a workmanlike approach to life and be able to get consistent results at something would be a threat to his worldview.
Don't give Pichai credit for that. Google had the strongest ML research org on the planet before he took over, and it had Demis, arguably the best researcher in the field (and it had Geoffrey Hinton before that). The fact that goog was so far behind OAI despite Demis blazing frontiers was a major management failure.
Sundar's enshittification has also juiced short term share prices at the cost of long term health. It might turn out to be a decent decision for search because it's in the midst of being disrupted, but that's a happy accident for Sundar, not 4d chess (and you can argue the enshittification hastened the disruption).
Possibly. First, I think there's still low hanging fruit in creating a programming language designed to be as easy as possible for agents to work with that we won't try to unlock until people writing code is a curiosity. Second, agents don't care about verbosity of code, so we can do verbosity/correctness/tooling tradeoffs that wouldn't have made sense when humans were the sole consumers of the code.
One nice thing about serializing/transmitting AST changes is that it makes it much easier to to compose and transform change sets.
The text based diff method works fine if everyone is working off a head, but when you're trying to compose a release from a lot of branches it's usually a huge mess. Text based diffs also make maintaining forks harder.
Git is going to become a big bottleneck as agents get better.
what do you actually gain over enforced formatting?
first you should not be composing releases at the end from conflicting branches, you should be integrating branches and testing each one in sequence and then cutting releases. if there are changes to the base for a given branch, that means that branch has to be updated and re-tested. simple as that. storing changes as normalized trees rather than normalized text doesn't really buy you anything except for maybe slightly smarter automatic merge conflict resolution but even then it needs to be analyzed and tested.
Diffs are fragile, and while I agree with that process in a world where humans do all the work and you aren't cutting a dozen different releases, I think that's a world we're rapidly moving away from.
in that case you probably flag a bunch of prs for release and it linearizes their order and rebases and tests each one a step ahead of your review (responding to any changes you make as you go).
This. I wouldn't have touched Nix when you needed someone who was really good at Nix to keep it working, but agents make it viable to use in a number of place.
I'm working on an autonomous agent framework that is set up this way (along with full authz policy support via OPA, monitoring via OTel and a centralized tool gateway with CLI). https://github.com/sibyllinesoft/smith-core for the interested. It doesn't have the awesome power of a 30 year old meme like the OP but it makes up for it with care.