I have received a ton of insults, even entire reaction videos about my toxic communication around artificial intelligence, because apparently I push FOMO onto developers and I have an agenda. Let me clear up a bit of what is going on under the surface. It is true, I have leaned hard into a certain tone: if you do not hurry up you are done for, you are incompetent. But I got to that tone for a reason.
Every big change takes the shape of a trauma
Since a lot of people cannot put two and two together, even in light of everything I have done over the last ten years with content and the last three or four with open source, let me spell it out. When change is fast, and when it calls into question the foundations of habits you built over many years of work, you are standing in front of a huge change. And every huge change takes the shape of a trauma.
This trauma, in the strict psychological sense, moves through several stages. The first stage is denial. Then comes anger, and then other stages we will talk about in future videos, all the way to the final one, which is acceptance. This blessed artificial intelligence has put a lot of people into the denial stage, because they cannot bring themselves to accept a change like this, they cannot bring themselves to reinvent themselves. And I understand them, I empathize, which is exactly why I made so many videos of encouragement.
From encouragement to provocation
At a certain point, though, the encouragement videos turned into provocation videos. I did that on purpose, and I will keep doing it. Why? Because when you see a change like this, the whole world starting to experiment with these things, sure, in all the noise you cannot make out much, but the substance is starting to show. There are things to study and to understand so you know how to move next.
There are still so many people sitting there going: this is not happening, it is all garbage. We have all the time in the world. You do have the time. But denying that this is happening, denying that what you learned to do over the last twenty years, ten years, is now needed less and will be done by fewer, more specialized people, that is just objective. And I invite people to experiment, because they need to figure out for themselves whether it is worth doubling down and specializing even further in a certain niche, using agents to help in a craft that is changing profoundly, or whether it is better to just look elsewhere entirely.
It is not a weaving machine, it is intelligence on tap
We are still at the industrial revolution here. There were all these people making textiles by hand or with rickety machines. When the weaving machines arrived, all hell broke loose. The difference now is that this is not a weaving machine. This is intelligence on tap. If you think you can ignore this stuff, or that you can learn it in a month, or that it does not touch you, in my opinion you have badly misjudged it. And I tell you that from the heart, because what we are witnessing is the explosion of a new technology that has made such leaps that it puts a great deal into question.
There is friction in the middle. Before this thing passes from scientists to industry, to the people who sell, all the way down through every layer of our civilization, capillary, it will take a lot of time. But that does not mean you wait until the last moment.
This is aimed at the people in charge too
This goes for anyone with responsibility over people who work for them as well. I see so many of them saying: no, we do not use this, the data is confidential. Fine. But no does not work. If you will not use the international language model vendor because you do not want to send all your code, all your intellectual property, to their servers, that means you need to start looking into how you run this stuff locally. Not sit there waiting to become a hundred times slower than everyone else, doing by hand something that no longer needs doing.
I see it in politics too. Italy is old. What you see in Italy is that we are asleep. Everyone is asleep, at every level.
So, folks, the invitation was always the same: try this stuff, it is interesting. I spent years and years talking about neural networks, I made YouTube playlists. Do not come and tell me I do this for FOMO, to scare people. The reason my communication got meaner, and it did get a bit meaner, is that people are not moving. We are asleep. It is not FOMO.
Really sit down in the evening, when you have the chance, take these new agents for writing code, and then come tell me if after a while of using them your whole world does not get turned upside down. Come tell me. I dare you. I dare anyone to use this stuff. Whether you have been programming for ten years, twenty, or thirty, I could not care less. Try this stuff, and then come tell me if it does not call everything into question.
