AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

AI can be an exoskeleton. It can be a co-worker and it can also replace you and your whole team.

The "Office Space"-question is what are you particularly within an organization and concretely when you'll become the bottleneck, preventing your "exoskeleton" for efficiently doing its job independently.

There's no other question that's relevant for any practical purposes for your employer and your well being as a person that presumably needs to earn a living based on their utility.

Imagine someone going to a local gym and using an exosqueleton to do the exercises without effort. Able to lift more? Yes. Run faster? Sure. Exercising and enjoying the gym? ... No, and probably not.

I like writing code, even if it's boilerplate. It's fun for me, and I want to keep doing it. Using AI to do that part for me is just...not fun.

Someone going to the gym isn't trying to lift more or run faster, but instead improving and enjoying. Not using AI for coding has the same outcome for me.

The exoskeleton doesn't replace instinct. It just removes friction from execution so more cycles go toward the judgment calls that actually matter.

And this write up is not an exception.

Why even bother thinking about AI, when Anthropic and OpenAI CEOs openly tell us what they want (quote from recent Dwarkesh interview) - "Then further down the spectrum, there’s 90% less demand for SWEs, which I think will happen but this is a spectrum."

So save thinking and listen to intent - replace 90% of SWEs in near future (6-12 months according to Amodei).

I will worry about developers being completely replaced when I see something resembling it. Enough people worry about that (or say it to amp stock prices) -- and they like to tell everyone about this future too. I just don't see it.

People need to understand that we have the technology to train models to do anything that you can do on a computer, only thing that's missing is the data.

If you can record a human doing anything on a computer, we'll soon have a way to automate it

Claude is that you? Why haven’t you called me?

Yet.

This is mostly a matter of data capture and organization. It sounds like Kasava is already doing a lot of this. They just need more sources.

Reliability comes from scaffolding: retrieval, tools, validation layers. Without that, fluency can masquerade as authority.

The interesting question isn’t whether they’re coworkers or exoskeletons. It’s whether we’re mistaking rhetoric for epistemology.

Running 17 products as an indie maker, I've found AI is less "do the same thing faster" and more "attempt things you'd never justify the time for." I now write throwaway prototypes to test ideas that would have died as shower thoughts. The bottleneck moved from "can I build this" to "should I build this" — and that's a judgment call AI makes worse, not better.

The real risk of the exoskeleton framing is that it implies AI makes you better at what you already do. In practice it makes you worse at deciding what to do, because the cost of starting is near zero but the cost of maintaining and shipping is unchanged.

But it's fun, I say "Henceforth you shall be known as Jaundice" and it's like "Alright my lord, I am now referred to as Jaundice"

How typical!

Stochastic Parrots. Interns. Junior Devs. Thought partners. Bicycles for the mind. Spicy autocomplete. A blurry jpeg of the web. Calculators but for words. Copilot. The term "artificial intelligence" itself.

These may correspond to a greater or lesser degree with what LLMs are capable of, but if we stick to metaphors as our primary tool for reasoning about these machines, we're hamstringing ourselves and making it impossible to reason about the frontier of capabilities, or resolve disagreements about them.

A understanding-without-metaphors isn't easy -- it requires a grasp of math, computer science, linguistics and philosophy.

But if we're going to move forward instead of just finding slightly more useful tropes, we have to do it. Or at least to try.