"Our" adversaries, huh? There are more people in our country than pedophile billionaires, but it's this group starting the wars, murdering civilians, and producing generations of "adversaries".
A person has a supervision budget. They can supervise one agent in a hands-on way or many mostly-hands-off agents. Even though theres some thrashing assistants still get farther as a team than a single micromanaged agent. At least that’s my experience.
Just curious, what kind of work are you doing where agentic workflows are consistently able to make notable progress semi-autonomously in parallel? Hearing people are doing this, supposedly productively/successfully, kind of blows my mind given my near-daily in-depth LLM usage on complex codebases spanning the full stack from backend to frontend. It's rare for me to have a conversation where the LLM (usually Opus 4.6 these days) lasts 30 minutes without losing the plot. And when it does last that long, I usually become the bottleneck in terms of having to think about design/product/engineering decisions; having more agents wouldn't be helpful even if they all functioned perfectly.
I've passed that bottleneck with a review task that produces engineering recommendations along six axis (encapsulation, decoupling, simplification, dedoupling, security, reduce documentation drift) and a ideation tasks that gives per component a new feature idea, an idea to improve an existing feature, an idea to expand a feature to be more useful. These two generate constant bulk work that I move into new chat where it's grouped by changeset and sent to sub agent for protecting the context window.
What I'm doing mostly these days is maintaining a goal.md (project direction) and spec.md (coding and process standards, global across projects). And new macro tasks development, I've one under work that is meant to automatically build png mockup and self review.
I work on 1M LOC 15 yr old repo. Like you it's across the full stack. Bugs in certain pieces of complex business logic would have catastrophic consequences for my employer. Basically I peel poorly-specific work items off my queue into its own worktree and session at high reasoning/effort and provide a well-specified prompt.
These things eat into my supervision budget:
* LLM loses the plot and I have to nudge (like you)
* Thinking hard to better specify prompts (like you)
* Reviewing all changes (I do not vibe code except for spikes or other low-risk areas)
* Manual thing I have to do (for things I have not yet automated with a agent-authored scripts)
* Meetings
* etc
So, yes, my supervision budget is a bottleneck. I can only run 5-8 agents at a time because I have only so much time in the day.
Compare that vs a single agent at high reasoning/effort: I am sitting waiting for it to think. Waiting for it to find the code area I'm talking about takes time. Compiling, running tests, fixing compile errors. A million other things.
Any time I find myself sitting and waiting, this is a signal to me to switch to a different session.
Capital is a commodity, just like a business' product. It does not produce value. Labor does. This is a central point of LTV!
We witnessed the same thing with looms and other automation in the Industrial Revolution. Capital that helps you produce more. But owners faced with increased competition under commoditized production see their profit margins fall. Thus they will turn to squeezing workers - the source of value - for profit in the newly commoditized landscape - exactly what happened during the Industrial Revolution. It was only when workers got their act together and organized that this decline was stopped and reversed.
Ok, but when the looms can autonomously analyze the market, design the products, organize purchasing and sales channel, run production, and deliver the products, the workers will not be squeezed. We will be discarded.
Even if it is worthless, it will still be used for these things - because of the sense of confidence it instills in the kinds of people undertaking these sorts of activities.
Many things are missing from this picture. It uses mean not median income, which would do a better job of telling how widespread the increase is. It uses a basic inflation adjustment which doesn’t differentiate between luxury goods and services vs basic necessities. In other words it’s hard to tell to what degree this rise has benefited people in general.
American tech companies have already built an apparatus of mass surveillance that works hand in glove with our government to violate our constitutional rights on a regular basis.
But it turns out that an economy based on rent extraction and enshittification can’t in the long run compete with one based on a real economy of industry, agriculture, and public services.
We should have privacy laws including mandated user control of user data. In my view, scaremongering around China just demonstates how uncompetitive the US is, in the long run. We should set our sights higher than merely begging to trade one form of technofeudalism for another.
The question isn’t the jobs created but how have workers benefited from increased productivity? They haven’t materially since late 1970s. That’s when the American labor movement began its decline. Innovation isn’t what helps workers. The gains from innovation have to be wrenched from the hands of the ruling class through organized resistance.
Right we had a functioning labor movement to thank for productivity gains being distributed to the working class. When that got undermined beginning late seventies early 80s with offshoring we see wealth just flowing to the top without significantly benefiting the working class.
Venezuela participates in a small portion of the illegal drug trade. US government officials have stated that they want Venezuela’s oil reserves. This is a transparent excuse for an oil grab.
So? And what about my point that fishermen don't move at 100 knots in speedboats filled with plastic wrapped packages they start dumping as soon as they're spotted?
How does Venezuela have so much oil and yet their population suffers tremendously?
Let me guess that is also somehow the fault of USA/capitalism/colonialism?
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