That's not my argument at all! Though I can see why you took that away; my bad for not making my argument clearer.
I believe that even when we have AGI, code will still be super valuable because it'll be how we get precise abstractions into human heads, which is necessary for humans to be able to bring informed opinions to bear.
> Any writer who admits that they are actively working towards having a machine write their material has lost me as a potential reader.
I partly understand this perspective. I think it gets at 'proof of work' – if you can forgive me borrowing a concept from crypto. Nobody wants to be on the receiving end of a low-effort output. That's just embarrassing.
For example, I am constantly getting fairly decent spam emails, but I literally never respond because that would be so lame. No matter how good spam emails get, I won't reply.
My investor Dan Levine says that in order to get a reply for a cold email you have to pass a mini Turing Test embedded in the email. This is increasingly hard as we approach AGI, defined as the point at which machine intelligence becomes indistinguishable from human intelligence. But I still think it's possible, but hard work and definitionally unscalable. (If you find a way to scale it, readers will learn to build up defenses against it. It's a never-ending arms race.)
But relying on human-written writing as the proof-of-work is limited in two ways:
1. When we do reach AGI, it will, definitionally, no longer be possible. CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) definitionally don't make sense in a world where you can't tell humans and machines apart.
2. It's a limited way to measure 'proof of work'.
There should be other ways to show 'proof of work'. The easiest example is money. Imagine if there was a frictionless way to pay $10 or $100 to send someone an email. Or attach $10 or $100 in cash to an email as a thank-you to the recipient for reading it. This kinda already exists in that you can buy time with famous people on various marketplaces or pay $1m to charity to get lunch with Warren Buffett. (Buffett ended up hiring one guy who did this!)
So yes, nobody wants to be a dupe, and if I mass produce a lot of writing (even if it's super high quality), I would deserve to lose readers. So I'd never do that.
Instead, if I had AI that could write in my voice as well as me, I'd use it to help me dramatically improve the quality of my writing. I'd keep my effort constant, and the quality bar would go way up. Ideally, it'd be a gift to you, my potential reader.
The important part of MCP (that this misses) is that it's a machine interface you can quickly iterate on. In other words, an API is too slow-moving. You can't break it; it's a promise. A UI is too annoying for an LLM to deal with. An MCP is the perfect middleground: speaks JSON, but there's inference involved, so if you change the tools, the LLM will be just fine. (Just like how you can change your UI much faster than you change your API, because there's inference at runtime, ie in the human brain.)
For example, at my startup val.town, our MCP server is way more powerful than our API, because we added a bunch of tools to it willynilly because we're not worried about having to be stuck with those tools forever. We can remove them and nobody's code will break. (Just like we could remove buttons in our UI.) But an API change needs to be thought-through.
Do you love programming? Do you love developers tools?
Consider working at Val Town. We're a small startup (currently three people) building a developer tool that makes programming as simple and fun as possible.
Yeah I definitely agree. I'm specifically talking about things you're not shipping or charging money for. Just little personal apps for you and friends or you and work colleagues. Internal tools, etc.
Strong agree! For example, we at Val Town just invested very heavily in getting a good ol' fashioned language server to work in our product to power hover-overs and type information in our web editor. That'll likely be our next company blog post...
The argument is that if you intent to maintain the code you should keep the AI on a very tight leash, and at least understand the architecture of the code, if not every line.
val.town | stevekrouse.com