Hi, Bob. How are you doing?

Yeah, yeah, totally. And by the way, thanks for the shout out about the studio. It's all thanks to generous viewer donations who believe in the cause of Doom Debates and so they've really helped me level up the show.

But yeah, as to Israel-Palestine, so we are two smart people who just have very different views, apparently, on Israel-Palestine. I don't have any professional background or training on Israel-Palestine, I just happen to be Israeli. I moved to the US when I was three, but I know a lot of people in Israel, a lot of my family's in Israel. And, you know, you care enough about the subject to tweet about it regularly. So I think it'll be good bonus content for your viewers. It's only going to be in overtime, right? So we're just teasing it now. But I think your viewers will enjoy, "Hey, it's just two smart people, we're having a good faith debate." I don't think I'm super ideological. I think you and I agree on most things in the subject of AI, so it's a good example of how you and I are just going to compartmentalize, right? It doesn't mean we have to hate each other on AI just because we have different views on Israel-Palestine. So it's going to be fun.

Yep. Yeah, you know, software engineer is what I used to call myself up until these last couple months. I've been programming computers since I was nine years old. My actual job, to the extent that I've had a real job instead of just making podcasts, has been connected to software engineering and running software companies. So I've written many thousands of lines of code in my life, and I like to think that I'm a 10x engineer.

It's just these last couple months, you know, in this takeoff, in this singularity, it's just been stunning what's been happening to software engineering. I'm not the only person saying this. I'm actually a little bit late to the party. Andrej Karpathy, right? He was tweeting about this. He's like, "This is a game changer, I've never seen this before. I have, like, 10 agents running."

I've really just dived into this in the last few weeks. And just long story short, I think I'm pretty much hanging up my title as a software engineer. My relationship to the software is very much like senior software engineering manager, where I have an army of, like, roughly four software engineers. It's as if I just got a budget of a million dollars a year to spend on four full-time software engineers who work for me and check in code very quickly, doing exactly what I tell them to do, and have excellent judgment, excellent speed, excellent breadth of knowledge.

And it's... it's like better than hiring four humans. Like, literally, you know, it's almost a drop-in replacement. Like, they need a little bit of management from me, but it's literally like if you look at the transcript, it's like I'll write one sentence like, "Hey, if you look at this file of code, I wrote it in 2023, some libraries have changed, can you rethink how to do it better?" Like, that's what I'll tell them. And then they're like, "Yeah, sure, give me two minutes. Okay, here's a plan." And I'm like, "Oh, good plan." And then they'll do it and I'll be like, "Oh, good execution." And I'll ask like one small question and they'll fix it. And then boom, git commit, like 500 lines of code change, looks perfect. Like, that's the experience of being a programmer today. It's just truly insane.

Yes, the only difference is that it's much faster. Right? So I can imagine hiring a senior software engineer, like this person, you know, graduated from MIT hypothetically, right? And they've worked at Google and they're highly intelligent and there's... it's hard to find a person like that. Only a small percentage of the human population even has the kind of aptitude to be that good at slinging software. That's why software engineers have always made so much money, because not that many humans are able and willing to do it.

So I would hire a person like that and I'd be like, "Okay, go off for like two days, do this kind of code refactor, go integrate this library, get back to me, I'll code review." But every time I tell them something, I can expect a few hours. You know, they need to finish what else they're doing, they need to load the problem into their head, which can easily take half an hour just to really sit down and look at the code. The AI does the same thing in like 30 seconds, and then it delivers the same product. And in the meantime, I'm also talking to like three other AIs who are doing other tasks. It's just, like, Bob, this is just... it's... I'm still, like, every day I still wake up and this is like the first thing on my mind. Like, I can't believe this is real.