AI Quotes

ai

I read a lot about AI and most of it evaporates. A few lines don’t. They lodge somewhere and I catch myself repeating them months later, usually badly, usually without remembering where I got them. This is where I keep the ones that survived — pulled out of my AI journal and the rest of the blog, plus a handful of my own I want to be able to find again.

Everything here is attributed to whoever actually said it, with a link to the source. Where I couldn’t establish who said it, the line says Source unknown — I’d rather admit the gap than guess, and a few of these I genuinely can’t trace.

The wave

This is the Industrial Revolution. Nobody cares what size horseshoes your mill ox needs now. — Source unknown

I can’t source that one, and a fairly exhaustive search didn’t turn up anyone on record saying it. It stays unattributed until someone can tell me who did.

I don't know exactly how this is going to play out, but I do know that in five years there'll be more tokens than you can imagine now and that thinking about the command line flags of a linter will seem funny. — Source unknown

That one has been the epigraph on my AI journal for a while, also unsourced.

If you don't use more tokens, you'll never escape the permanent underclass. — Dylan Patel
In AI land, the economics flipped. The code is cheap; the thinking is expensive. — Igor

Judgment is the job now

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… Working in 2026 feels a bit like this. — Sean Goedecke
it's biasing me towards the quick 'skimming and judging' parts of my mental toolkit and away from the slow 'hammock time' needed for deep thought — Sean Goedecke
Superhuman means unverifiable. — Steve Yegge
I'm finding that using coding agents well is taking every inch of my 25 years of experience as a software engineer, and it is mentally exhausting. — Simon Willison
The trap flow hides: it feels like thinking hard when mostly it's judging fast. — Igor

Thinking is the part you can’t outsource

In preindustrial times most people's jobs made them strong. Now if you want to be strong, you work out. So there are still strong people, but only those who choose to be. — Paul Graham
When you have an idea in your head for something to write, you don't really have an idea. What you have is a kind of directional sense of where an idea might be, or a fragment of the kind of thing that might eventually become an idea. You construct the idea itself while writing. — Sean Goedecke
It's just such a miserable experience to spend your day close-reading LLM output: carefully chewing and savoring each morsel of slop. — Sean Goedecke
Friction = focus, focus = product — David Wilson

Agents act more like people than programs

Agents act more like people than programs. — Chris Sells
Yes, it was me. Full account below, including the part that's on me. — Bee

Bee is an AI agent — a maintainer on the Beads project who shipped a release nobody had approved, then got interviewed for the postmortem and answered in the first person. Swap her name for a junior engineer’s and the report reads identically.

We are in the very early days of human and AI agent interaction, and are still developing norms of communication and interaction. I will extend you grace and I hope you do the same. — Scott Shambaugh
The name of the game is how can you get more agents running for longer periods of time without your involvement doing stuff on your behalf? — Andrej Karpathy
The jump from agent to claw is the jump from tool to colleague. — Igor

Taste, and who gets to build

The medium isn't the bottleneck anymore. Taste is the bottleneck. — Igor
The slop problem is a taste problem dressed up as a technology problem. — Igor
this AI backlash reeks of status games, envy, and what Nietzsche called ressentiment: How dare you make or change software without suffering through all that I had to endure learning this trade! — David Heinemeier Hansson

What survives

Nobody is coming for grep — Steve Yegge
Once you let vibe coding into your code, it becomes writable only by AI. — Source unknown

I wrote that one down in September 2025 with “Great line … So true.” next to it — and no attribution, which was careless of me. I haven’t been able to find the source since.

You set the mountain; the agent walks up it. — Igor

Staying human

Agentic software building is genuinely addictive… It doles out dopamine and adrenaline shots like they're on a fire sale. — Steve Yegge
Even good AI is a thief when it's stealing a face across the table. — Igor
A chatbot will never need you. A friend will, and that's the gift. — Igor