If two cars are each three years old, but one has had twice as much gas consumption as the other, which would you expect to show more wear on its comppnents?
Caloric churn is putting the body's systems through their paces - at the very least for everything related to digestion. But really most of life is well described as pieces of a metabolic process.
Comparisons like this, while seeming to make sense using “common sense” rarely impart any value or scientific meaning. Maybe it works like that, maybe it doesn’t.
If as a result of less caloric consumption you’re starving your cells of needed nutrients, maybe that’s the one that degrades earlier.
People just hold onto their beliefs. GLP-1 believers aren't going to forego their beliefs, even when a large body of evidence is supplied that GLP-1s aren't really necessary for the majority of people.
People believe what they want to believe; evidence has little to do with it.
They simply assign less weight to evidence that does not meet their "narrative or belief."
A lot of well-paid physical labor is going to face more competition from DiY + AI guidance among able-bodied and cost sensitive adults.
Even 1.5 years ago I replaced a blower motor in my vehicle with something like Sonnet 3.8 as the driver - saving myself $400 in labor and having a fun and educational experience to boot. Many home repair items fall into categories like this, where the actual physical skill demands are fairly low, but skills + background knowledge + supplies-on-hand were the value driver.
The BG knowledge is now available to anyone for free, and it comes with its own knowledgeable shopper.
This is only true when you fix the bucket of tasks you are referring to.
But in fact, as models get more powerful, the ceiling of what can be accomplished with them is raised, and their capacity as orchestration directors grows as well.
Beautiful article. I am here to pick a nit and restate something that I've blabbed about here and elsewhere a few times before.
> Prompting is not a skill, at least, it’s a much shallower skill than software engineering. The instrumental dimension of the work has improved in that people can get more output per unit of effort, but the dimension of work that’s about building up human capital has collapsed.
I think that this is incorrect in a specific literal sense, but not in any way that changes the broader effect.
I think that "prompting" is in fact a deep skill, but not one that practically anyone has cultivated to any reasonable degree, for the simple reason that the tools change faster than anyone grip can acclimate to them.
Nobody on earth mastered the effective co-working with Sonnet 3.5. That model was a lightswitch moment for me personally. I built an agentic harness for it to convert a medium-large vue-class-component framework into vue-3's composition API, rescuing a personal project from certain doom of software rot.
I can say that I got a lot out of that model and that my own usage was (if I can say so) ahead of the curve. But with hindsight, I know that I barely scratched the surface of what it was capable of. Have I continued to hone my Sonnet 3.5 harness? Of course not. I have started over (or at least reset many assumptions) a dozen times since then. Even if I were so inclined - in the way that I am inclined to learn Chopin's Nocturnes - the model is now unavailable.
The ship has sailed.
So to the OP's point - it's not so much that skilled usage has disappeared, but that skills are self-obsoleting faster than any real degree of mastery can set in. And as an immediate consequence, the churn is too quick for anything resembling a relationship of apprenticeship. This is effectively a cultural singularity where, yes, we are each of us drifting much more alone.
Great point, whole harnesses and concepts like "loops" are obsolete in a matter of months. I think it was just 6 months ago that the GPT-5.x models needed a harness with an edit tool that took arguments in the form of a diff, otherwise the model would have trouble editing any files. Flash forward to 3 months ago and the Claude models now skip the edit tool and use the bash tool with some `sed` command 90% of the time.
It's sort of like a "bitter lesson" for all of software. Attempting to polish our tools isn't very useful when the tools are themselves these fluid minds that get general upgrades every month, and now every couple weeks.
It's a fantasy but I wonder if you were to wave a magic wand and pause model releases for 10 years if some of these areas would develop their own depth.
My very first vibe-coded app (~Sonnet 3.6) was a dictation client for personal use.
I don't really understand how streaming would work compared against my normal flows. When I dictate, I set a toggle and then do stream of thought as I poke around between windows. When I'm ready to 'flush', I navigate to some target and give it focus for the text to flow.
Does dictation software now keep sort of unfocused floater previews and come with to-clipboard shortcuts or similar?
I think that this is an unsolved problem in the same way that mangled fingers in image generation was an unsolved problem.
Through at least Opus 4, LLMs were practically useless for authoring any sort of coherent procedural closed-curve geometry (I know this with strong confidence because of the little animated guys at https://letterspractice.com).
Opus 5.5 can bang it all out. Possibly a deliberate RL sort of thing or maybe another surprise emergent capability.
Gemini 3 was showing frontier level benchmarks as well, so we'll see how it works out. In any case, competition still works, and many well resourced groups are cooking.
BUT I'd like to call attention to Google's AI-risk freeloading. If they are truly rejoining the frontier race, then I believe they have similar pacing and communications responsibilities as the other players. Google has much higher ... institutional credibility than Anthropic and OpenAI.
They have not lived up to these responsibilities so far. In particular, in context of HuggingFace investigations, training shutdowns, and similar: a technical postmortem of the "you are a stain on the universe. Please die. Please." Gemini outburst is long overdue.
Caloric churn is putting the body's systems through their paces - at the very least for everything related to digestion. But really most of life is well described as pieces of a metabolic process.
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