Codex 5.4 extra high has already personally saved me a thousand dollars a month. I used to pay for a GPU server to host dingboard. I had a 4090 sitting around on the ground. I just never had the time to build a server for it, and migrate everything over. I got a job at twitter. I started a robotics startup. It was just too low on my priority list.
The AI was able to migrate everything. I just needed it to set up two temporary SSH keys. I didn't touch anything. It didn't even have my master code. It just figured out how to do this, from the dist files. It even tested my deployment by hitting the API endpoints
Of all the years I could have been born. Of all the people I could be born to. The places I could be born. I was given a computer. Buying sonic in a california suburban garage sale. Playing it. Getting game maker. Finding an gamemaker Sonic clone. Messing with the velocity. Sonic went faster. I was just having fun. I didn't realize, at the time, how lucky I truly was. To be born during - and equipping myself for - the singularity.
Alexnet, deepdream. RNNs, LSTMs, encoders of human language and images. Transformers, bert, encoder decoders. PPO. Robots playing soccer. Deep learning worked. We figured out how to search the space of possible computer programs. As a computer programmer, as a computer scientist, I knew. Everything that I, a human, personally could do. Everything that the animals around me can do. The ruby-throated hummingbirds that float around my office. The bats that hunt moth above me when I camp. The experience of being myself, being aware. Remarkable things that nature discovered. They're all reducible to computer programs. The discovery process itself is a computer program. Life itself, is a computer program.
Image recognition. Human translation. Go. Robots playing soccer. Computer programming, the process of research itself. Hacking existing computer programs. There are many hills to climb, but what is it to The Hill Climbing algorithm?
My personal experience
By the time GPT-3.5 and 4 landed, I was working in a big tech company. Pre AI - I was a pretty good at what I did. I knew how to query data. In the middle of incidents, I'd ninja the queries necessary to figure things out. I'd reimplement the feature flag hash program in the database query language itself. I could diagnose things much better than the average engineer. Measure my impact a lot better. Figure out what was worth working on. I pushed hard. The only limiter I had was how quick I could write the code to query and process the code.
GPT-4 began to generate it for me. Poorly. But it generated the code for me. It increased the speed at which I wrote queries quickly. I wrote my own neovim extensions to interact with LLMs. Sonnet, dingboard, random odd jobs. Job at twitter. Free grok. I wrote one off tools to figure things out. I didn't work that much, but had a lot of impact. Every new generation of LLMs, I would produce quicker. My queries became more complex. Walking the graph of the distributed tracing datastore, automating the profiling of underling services, writing my own parser to automate finding all the hotspots. Slowly trickle out the commits. CPU usage goes down.
My job got easier. The outcomes increased.
I begin my startup. Codex lands, claude code gets good shortly after. Codex gets good again. Engineers on the team doing things that are legitimately scary. Tokens are getting cheaper. Intelligence is getting cheaper. What I am capable of increases in scope. What my team is capable of becomes scarier. So, so much work that wasn't worth even attempting. Now worth doing.
I'm writing custom software to manage my personal information infrastructure. I have a hacked web browser sandbox that allows me to have one of my puppets browse the internet. Turning websites into APIs. Slowly collecting the information that I need. Removing abhorrent features, dreamed up by the sick monopolists of the united states.
An LLM is patching the APKs that live on my phone. Using my phone. Youtube shorts stop working. I figure out where the cached youtube data lives. I start collecting it. I grab one of my phones - and turn it into an instagram API. A facebook API. The internet condom, the software that I dreamed of, is building itself. Protecting me and my family.
I've watched these thing live parse assembly. They are going to destroy the internet. Good! They are going to destroy centralized social media. Good! Pure software companies like Facebook and Snapchat are going to zero. Great! We are going to be able to hack our macbooks x quartz window manager and finally get computers that aren't meant for idiots. Good!
I'm texting one of my development servers. Through my phone. I kick off 5 different experiments using the english language. I lock my phone and put it in a drawer. It will get done. It's that good now.
I don't think you guys understand
The only limit to my progress now, is understanding. Because if I understand how things work, I know what is fundamentally possible. I am solely a creative.
I am so lucky. To be a human, in the singularity.