It comes off as someone who lives their life according to quantity, not quality.
The real insight: have some fucking pride in what you make, be it a blog post, or a piece of software.
It comes off as someone who lives their life according to quantity, not quality.
The real insight: have some fucking pride in what you make, be it a blog post, or a piece of software.
> The real insight: have some fucking pride in what you make, be it a blog post, or a piece of software.
The businessmen's job will be complete when they've totally eliminated all pride from work.
At the same time, if there is a business opportunity in having pride when no one else has it, it will become a businessmen's job to do so.
This same instinct is why a pencil costs almost nothing and is perfect, and isn't rubbish, really expensive, and created by someone who took pride in their work.
> This same instinct is why a pencil costs almost nothing and is perfect, and isn't rubbish, really expensive, and created by someone who took pride in their work.
No. Have you worked with businessmen? 90% of the time they're telling you to cut corners and leave things broken, to the point you have a janky mess that can be barely held together. And, right now, we're talking about a technology (LLMs) that is well known to introduce stupid but often hard to spot errors.
They don't want a pencil that's perfect. They want one that's just barely good enough to write with and that they can get maximum profit margin on.
And then, you know, there's the whole thing about life being more than output.
Life can be more than output, which is why you don't want buying pencils, or anything else, to take up any more of your wages than is absolutely necessary.
> Life can be more than output, which is why you don't want buying pencils, or anything else, to take up any more of your wages than is absolutely necessary.
You're not getting it. It'd probably help if you stopped focusing on your pencil story, it's frankly off-topic.
To try one more time: You probably spend half your waking ours at work. The quality of that time is important to your well being. Even if the businessmen sell you cheap, perfect pencils (which I do not grant), swimming in them in your off hours won't help with the other half of your time.
> It'd probably help if you stopped focusing on your pencil story, it's frankly off-topic.
I've no idea what this italicisation is meant to do; nor why this is off-topic. Stating things isn't explaining them.
> Even if the businessmen sell you cheap, perfect pencils (which I do not grant), swimming in them in your off hours won't help with the other half of your time.
It helps in that I don't have to spend as much of my time working to buy pencils. It's the same with everything. There's no reason why a laptop doesn't cost $1m except that the incredible, detailed, cross-continent cooperative work is done by experts and coordinated by a market for that work driving costs down and quality up.
I hope you don't take pride in that sentence because I'm still not sure what it means.
Also, automation and pride can go hand in hand. Pride doesn't mean "make it by hand," that would be silly.
To put it another way: an apocryphal businessman took something that people took pride in and gradually optimised everything so much that all the logging, transportation, graphite work and combination resulted in a perfect pencil that costs basically nothing almost anywhere in the world.
Pencils here are a bit like grains. The market works for them because they fall into such a niche that economic "laws" works there.
But it's a fallacy to apply it elsewhere and there are millions of examples where the free market failed to optimize a product.
I don't agree. Loads of things are like this. Cars, microchips, hard drive storage, monitors, TVs, laptops. All either much better than they used to be, or much cheaper, or both.
Do you actually use pencils? The most popular US (cheapo) brands have atrocious quality because they compromised on materials and construction to get the lowest sticker price possible.
The brands that do have a claim to "perfection" necessarily had the pride to not participate in that race to the bottom.
Don't forget to turn your point into a playful rhetorical question [0].
"The real insight?"
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypophora
Where's the pride in what you make when you're using AI agents? Seems like you're fantasizing about a by-gone era. The name of the activity, "vibe-coding", already makes it clear that this is a pride-free industry.
Taking pride in your work makes your labor more expensive than that of someone who does not do this, so over time as "efficiency" increases, you will eventually be removed and replaced by someone without these compunctions. Taking no pride in your work is economically rational and maximizes your long-term value to capital.
Economically rational, but bereft of identity or _soul_ -- which, paradoxically, becomes highly valued when economically rational agents all regress to a mean of mediocrity.
Valued by the worker to give meaning and quality of life not by the buyer - so it does carry much weight.