This didn’t really fit into what I wanted to say in the previous post about the DHH podcast.

But I nevertheless wanted to record these rough ideas because I find these statements sus and exposes a sort of from-the-ass-talking that really gave me pause about the quality and earnestness of their opinions.

DHH (01:20:29): The future’s coming whether you like it or not, so you might as well choose to be excited about it.

A colleague shared this transcript with me: https://lexfridman.com/dhh-2-transcript

He said he really wants to adopt this viewpoint on AI, its optimism in particular. So I gave it a read. The whole thing, all 5 hours of it.

People seem to have this idea that large language models (LLM’s) can be relied upon to do complex things. People want to do things like “deep research”, pretending that an LLM can effectively perform the job of a research analyst. People make insulting statements like “GPT-4o…enables PhD-level reasoning”. People seem to be under the impression that LLM’s can be productive on their own ^{1 2} , that it’s a good idea to let agentic AI loose with access to the ability to submit proposed code to public open-source software, and disparage its maintainer when it is rejected (and I venture to say many are not discouraged by this result).