The Weirdening

We are at the forefront of the weirdening.

The world is careening toward a kind of collective psychosis. The ability to understand anything from a fundamental truth level is becoming harder. Soon it will be impossible to tell what is real and what is fake. Videos, pictures, audio, text, news. All of it suspect. All of it potentially fabricated.

We already have this in politics. Two groups of people look at the exact same event and see entirely different things. Not different interpretations of the same facts. Different realities. If you put these people in a vacuum and asked them “Here is a thing that happened, is it good or bad?” they might actually agree. But what they’re seeing through their phones is a representation of that event. They’re interpreting it so differently that to each of them, their version is the objective truth.

There is no shared reality anymore. Just overlapping hallucinations.

This is only going to get worse.

Why software is the canary

Tech is at the forefront of this weirdening because we’re at an existential cliff. If you work on AI, use AI, your company uses AI, or you sell an AI product, there aren’t too many steps left before your job is redundant.

There’s a philosopher-engineer cope that you can never really replace humans. That there will always need to be someone to write the code or sell the product. I don’t buy it. I think it’s something we tell ourselves so we can keep showing up to work.

The companies pushing these models, implementing them, replacing humans with them, don’t have the foresight to see where this snaps. Or maybe they do and they just don’t care. Either way, everything becomes agent to agent eventually.

I’m not saying these agents are AGI or sentient or even particularly intelligent. What I’m saying is we have effectively mimicked what many people do on a day-to-day basis. It’s disparate right now. For advanced applications you need to be technical. But rewind one year and we didn’t have vibe coding. We didn’t have any of this. People talked about “oh we could get replaced.” Now people are getting replaced. Right now. While everyone pretends it’s fine.

Fast-forward two or three years.

The snap

Five to ten years out, you could have a company that is effectively autonomous. No employees. What is the output of a company other than the vision of a founder who then has to build a thing, sell a thing, and improve a thing? If you can create a loop between agents doing all of those activities, which sounded far-fetched a year ago but doesn’t anymore, you can see where this goes.

Is this happening in nursing? No. Dentistry? No. Electrical work? No. Those require embodiment. Physical presence. Hands.

Software doesn’t need hands. Software that doesn’t need a hardware component is the canary in the coal mine for the replacement of humans. And the canary is already dead. We’re just watching it fall.

The weird part

Here’s where it gets strange. If it’s all agents talking to agents, selling to each other, buying from each other, then who needs to buy the software? Who is the customer? What is the point?

Play this out thirty years. There’s a point where it snaps, where you have an AI-driven B2B market with minimal human interaction. Agents negotiating with agents. Contracts signed by no one. Services rendered to no one who can appreciate them. These companies aren’t thinking that far ahead, but they are laying off thousands of people at a time. A product manager today can do 10x the work they could do last year. So why hire? Why hire anyone?

I am building more software now, by myself, than I did with a team of five engineers. No loss in quality. I know what I’m doing. It’s faster. Looks better. Functions better. And every time I ship something, I wonder how long until I’m not needed for this either.

Two weirdnesses

So we have two weirdnesses converging.

The consumer-side weirdening: not knowing what’s true. Overlapping hallucinations all the way down. This will accelerate.

The livelihood-side weirdening: not knowing what humans will actually do to make money. What we will do with ourselves. This is happening first in software because software doesn’t need a body.

The canary is dead.

I don’t have an answer for it.