In my view, the current core AI skill is shifting as much work onto AI agents as possible, without going too far. Many people are under-utilizing agents: not allowing them to investigate bugs or test their changes, or not throwing enough simple tasks at them. Other people are over-utilizing them: using them to write messages that ought to be hand-written, or trusting them to make sweeping changes that need careful human review. ...
Give me a blank page of my notebook and my pen — I shall fill that page in no time. I’ve been doing this for years now. It doesn’t matter the problem, something with math and numbers: paper and pen. Org structures? Paper and pen. Blog posts? Paper and pen. This seems to work because the human mind abhors the emptiness of a blank page. I typically juice the cycle by writing a heading, a date, or any one liner associated with what I want to think about to get things moving. From there the mess happens, scribbles and words. They are disjointed but reconfigured with arrows. In all of that, my thinking solidifies, and the idea takes hold. ...
Thanks for Simon Willison for the link. […] Between 2000 and 2024, farmers sold in total a Colorado-sized chunk of land all on their own, 77 times all land on data center property in 2028, and grew more food than ever on what was left. None of this caused any problems for US food access. And then, in the middle of all this, a farmer in Loudoun County sells a few acres of mediocre hay field to a hyperscaler for ten times its agricultural value, and the response is that we’re running out of farmland. ...