yesterday, Thorsten Ball tweeted this -
(link to tweet incase your email client doesn’t show it - https://x.com/thorstenball/status/2101305394190557466?s=20)
I shared this with the discord and as you might expect, there was a lot of disagreement. Now Thorsten is prophesying, and as we know one should never prophesy, especially about the future, but what seems apparent to me given the model improvements over the last year or so, that it will soon not be possible to keep up with machine intelligence. Code Review is about to be dead. We will find new ways of ensuring systems stay reliable, by which I mean we will find new ways for agents to ensure reliability while we observe, monitor, watch.
And then one realises just how much of SDLC is set up for humans. Our version control systems assume only one entity writing code on one machine (imagine!).
And now the machines are coming for it. Humans will not be able to operate in this new environment. They’ll be manning the consoles as the machines do all the work and many have started to ask - so where does that leave us programmers?
To answer this question I want to share with you a small story. These days my wife is on location shooting and it’s just me and our 16 year old son at home and so the TV watching has shifted in his direction a little bit. Which is how we came to be watching the 2026 GeoGuessr World Championships. And I have to say - GenZ has figured out a lot of things.
Can you imagine a competition for who can identify a location on Earth using StreetView and nothing else? Who comes up with such an idea?
See, for ever and ever, the young have not been able to be economic agents. They had nothing to spend. They could, at best, be made to produce things, but they never had an abundance of anything. Then a new currency appeared - attention. And suddenly they now have something of value. And they, in their childlike innocence, began entering into the marketplace. They hyped up their favourites, they rooted for their friends, they propped up the underdog. They showered kudos and emojis and superlikes and so on. They earned karma and turned it into real money for the artists and streamers they loved.
This is entirely new. They invented a whole damn sport out of Google Street View and then organised it enough to host a world championship. They have done this over and over and over again.
And it is this first generation of precocious economic participants that is going to be working out who has which job, who gets how much. And they reward good vibes over everything else. They understand that if they keep attention circulating, it comes back to them multifold when they need it. This is the first generation that has had an This same attitude towards money and they will have a healthy society - no one will be poor. Some will be rich, very rich even, and celebrated for being so. Nay, only those who are celebrated will be rich. High floor, infinite ceiling.
The other thing that has happened is that extracting things from nature to provide food, shelter and clothing for all is solved. We are entering into an age of material abundance. All we have to do is work out who gets what and in return for what.
This closely held material, this miserly manner of transaction, this hyperoptimisation of terms, all this happens when material is limited. Attention may be limited, but the heart is infinite.
And because this generation has learnt dealing from the heart, they will allow the emotions of love and pity to enter into their economic transactions. Because attention is now a currency, the young will always have economic power.
Of course they will lose some of their innocence as they enter into the maelstrom of running adult institutions. But they will bring their karma points and emojis with them. And they will build institutions and create jobs where none exist.
If you enjoy learning Unix arcana, there will be a world championship for you to compete in.