Just over a year ago I wrote Why we should anthropomorphize LLMs. Now it’s a hot topic again, driven by Dwarkesh Patel’s description of OpenAI’s recent swarm breakout as a sequence of AI “civilizations”.
In 2025, my argument for anthropomorphism went like this:
AIs are trai...
Automated AI text detection is currently an underserved niche. The only game in town is Pangram, which does an excellent job but desperately needs more competition. In a few years, I would be surprised if every major social network doesn’t scan new posts1 and comments for AI...
A lot of people think that good leadership requires radical responsibility. Conscious Leadership defines it like this:
Taking full responsibility for one’s circumstances (physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually) is the foundation of true personal and relational tr...
“Workslop” is when your colleagues or bosses communicate with you by pasting big chunks of AI-generated text. The core problem with workslop is that the effort involved is asymmetrical, like a denial-of-service attack: it takes almost no effort to produce text with AI, but i...
In 2025, I wrote that software engineers ought to be assessed by “value over replacement”: not how much money they made for their company, but how much they would have made compared to the average engineer in their position. I’ve always found it vaguely silly when engineers ...
In 1973, Tom Lehrer famously sang that “selling out is easy to do”. That may have been true in the seventies, but it’s not true today: selling out requires both technical skill and a careful sense of how large organizations work in practice. One of the goals of this blog is ...
I try not to give a lot of prescriptive advice about working in tech companies1. There are many ways to be successful, and every company works differently. If you’re shipping projects and your management chain is happy, it doesn’t really matter how you’ve accomplished it. Ho...
In the last few weeks, I’ve been complaining that everyone is wrong about AI watermarking: it isn’t really anti-consumer and it doesn’t make the outputs any worse. The watermarking papers demonstrate1 that this is true, but I thought it might be interesting to put it to a pr...
One of the most influential 20th century pieces of writing about AI is Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question. Although there are many humans in the story, the protagonist is the computer Multivac, who evolves over the course of ten trillion years from a single datacenter to a uni...
People are pretty unhappy about Anthropic’s recent announcement that they’re planning to include a hidden watermark in Claude model outputs. Will this lead to a mass exodus from Anthropic models? Will the introduction of watermarking be a meaningful change for users?
No. AI ...
Every time a new open-weight AI model is released, people say that local models are the future. Why spend billions of dollars building out datacenters when everyone will just be able to run AI models on their laptops or phones? I think this idea is doomed. No matter how stro...
Everyone knows that AI sycophancy is when the model tells you how smart you are. Wow, you’re absolutely right. That’s not just a new idea — it’s genuinely groundbreaking. You’re a very special user. Easy to spot, isn’t it?
The discussion around AI sycophancy peaked last year...
This will be kind of an unusual post. I got a recent email about my writing that I thought was such a good articulation of one common criticism that I’d like to share it (and my response) in full.
Here’s the email, from William Murray1:
Hey Sean,
I have enjoyed your writing...
Imagine you’re the guest on some kind of frenetic, software-engineering-themed game show. The host is constantly flipping over new cards with questions that you have to answer as fast as possible:
Is this adjustment to the database schema right?
Do these bits of data look p...
Engineers often complain that visibility should be their manager’s job. In other words, they think engineers should be able to focus on the code, while their manager figures out who’s doing well and rewards them.
This attitude is an extension of the “school fantasy”: the ide...
One recent development in AI is its ability to solve some long-standing problems in mathematics. In 2024 and 2025, this was a trickle: once or twice a year somebody would say that an LLM came up with a proof, and then everyone would argue over whether that counted as “real” ...
When you’re on fire, problems are transparent: they’re solved simply by the act of looking at them. Even complicated layers of multiple problems can simply be glanced through like stacked panes of glass. But nobody can work that way all the time.
This is a common pitfall for...
In the 2010s, if you had technical gaps (say, you couldn’t write CSS), you had to either rely on a skilled colleague or just hope that the answer to your exact problem was out there on the internet. Today, everyone can write sort-of-okay CSS by delegating the task to an LLM....
Before large language models, people who worried about AI safety often talked about the “boxing problem”. It goes like this. Suppose some genius figures out artificial intelligence in a late-night coding session on their laptop. Because they’re a genius, they’re smart enough...
Here’s the big idea in Keith Johnstone’s book Impro:
Children are naturally creative, but are violently formed into repressed adults by Western culture and education
The process of becoming more creative and expressive is largely a process of unlearning these habits of repr...
The anonymous blogger Gwern recently completed a thirteen thousand word post called Human-like Neural Nets by Catapulting, in which he offers a theory about why LLMs don’t possess truly flexible human-like intelligence, and how we might train LLMs that do. Theories like this...
Software engineers are often told to “start playing politics”, but most engineers have no idea what that means.
Their reference point for “playing politics” comes from fiction like Game of Thrones. Are they supposed to raise an army and depose the CEO, or poison each other a...
When you write, you should try to say things that are obviously true, and spend very little time worrying about whether you’re being original. Ironically, this is the best way to do truly original writing.
Every important idea has been discussed already. I learned this in gr...
As a software engineer, how well do you have to understand your own codebase?
My guess is that people who work on small codebases with low-turnover teams (say, Redis or games like The Witness) would say “obviously you have to understand it completely, otherwise you can’t do ...
Every post I publish represents at least two things I’ve learned: the thing that prompted me to write the post, and the thing I learned in the course of writing it. If I don’t learn anything new while I’m writing, it’s not interesting enough to publish.
Typically I learn way...
The European Union AI Act is Europe’s attempt to comprehensively regulate AI usage. A big part of that is the requirement that AI-generated content be identifiable: either tagged with a watermark or with what the Act calls “digitally signed metadata”1. Since all this becomes...
The European Union AI Act will begin to be enforceable in August 2026, one month from now1. One of the biggest new requirements is Article 50, which requires all AI outputs to be “detectable as artificially generated”. In other words, if LLM providers want to do business in ...
Stating the obvious is surprisingly useful. Most of your knowledge lives below the threshold of conscious awareness, so it’s possible for a piece of writing to remind you of what you already know. It’s common to know you don’t like something without being quite sure why, and...
Many people claim that AI inference is unprofitable to serve, and thus must be subsidized by an ocean of dumb money from investors who believe that some future AI model will come to dominate the world economy. When that dumb money goes away, so will AI products. According to...
People who think current AI use is unsustainable often rely on the claim that inference GPUs only last “three years at the most” under load1. The idea here is that once the AI bubble money drains away, current infrastructure will rapidly become obsolete, and there won’t be e...
