Over the last couple months, I've been building world bibles, writing and visual style guides, and other documents for this project… think the fiction equivalent of all the markdown files we use for agentic development now. After that, this was about two weeks of additional polish work to cut out a lot of fluff and a lot of the LLM-isms. Happy to answer any questions about the process too if that would be interesting to anybody.
Just saying that everything is going to go to shit and one or two corporations will take over everything... Maybe, but I've heard that story already.
I'm mildly thrown off by some inconsistencies. Carol says "I’ve been under-watering that spot on purpose for thirty years," and then a paragraph down Tom's thoughts say "Carol didn’t know that she under-watered the clay spot." Carol considers a drip irrigation timer the last acceptable innovation, but then the illustration points to the greenhouse as the last acceptable illustration. Several other things as well, mostly in the illustrations.
Are these real inconsistencies or am I misunderstanding? Was this story AI-assisted (in part or all)? Is this meta-commentary?
I guess I'm also learning the value of working with an editor from first principles... over the last couple weeks before publishing I read through and made edits to this piece at least twice a day and still didn't catch this.
However, I do wonder if it is a bit too hung up on the current state of the technology, and the current issues we are facing. For example, the idea that the AI coded tools won't be able to handle (or even detect) that upstream data has changed format or methodology. Why wouldn't this be something that AI just learns to deal with? There us nothing inherent in the problem that is impossible for a computer to handle. There is no reason to think AIs can't learn how to code defensively for this sort of thing. Even if it is something that requires active monitoring and remediation, surely even today's AIs could be programmed to monitor for these sorts of changes, and have them modify existing code when to match the change when they occur. In the future, this will likely be even easier.
The same thing is true with the 'orchestration' job. People already have begun to solve this issue, with the idea of a 'supervisor' agent that is designing the overall system, and delegating tasks to the sub-systems. The supervisor agent can create and enforce the contracts between the various sub-systems. There is no reason to think this wont get even better.
We are SO early in this AI journey that I don't think we can yet fully understand what is simply impossible for an AI to ever accomplish and what we just haven't figure out yet.
I feel like this ultimately boils down to something similar to nocode vs code debates that you mention. (Is openclaw having these flowcharts similar to nocode territory?)
at some point, code is more efficient in doing so, maybe even people will then have this code itself be generated by AI but then once again, you are one hallucination away from a security nightmare or doesn't it become openclaw type thing once again
But even after that, at some point, the question ultimately boils down to responsibility. AI can't bear responsibility and there are projects which need responsibility because that way things can be secure.
I think that the conclusion from this is that, we need developers in the loop for the responsibility and checks even if AI generated code stays prevalent and we are seeing some developers already go ahead and call them slop janitors in the sense that they will remove the slop from codebase.
I do believe that the end reason behind it is responsibility. We need someone to be accountable for code and we need someone to take a look and one who understands the things to prevent things from going south in case your project requires security which for almost all production related things/not just basic tinkering is almost necessary.
For the exact same reason why there is absolutely no technical reason why two departments in a company can't talk to each other and exchange data, but because of <whatever> reason they haven't done that in 20 years.
The idea that farmers will just buy "AI" as a blob that is meant to do a thing and these blobs will never interact with each other because they weren't designed to(as in - John Deere really doesn't want their AI blob to talk to the AI blob made by someone else, even if there is literally no technical reason why it shouldn't be possible), seems like the most likely way things will go - it's how we've been operating for a long time and AI won't change it.
Or you can ask the agent to do this after each round. Or before a deploy. They are great at performing analysis.
> If the world must change, I hope at least we still tell such stories and share how we feel within that change. If so, come what may, that's a future I know I can live in.
This is really the whole idea behind this project with Near Zero. I think there's a lot of anxiety out there around AI and the future, I was there for a while too. Ultimately I've ended up pretty optimistic about it all, and inspired by what the group at Protocolized is doing, found science fiction a great way to help express that.
I don't know if this is what the future will look like, but this looks realistic. And if my non-existent grandson starts re-coding my business without asking, he's going to spend the next six months using K&R C.
Edit: got it right!
30 minutes ago it was on the front-page, now I can't find it listed in the top 200.
some inconsistencies that stuck out/i found interesting:
- HWY 29 doesnt run through marshfield, its about 15 miles north.
- not a lot of people grow cabbage in central wisconsin ;)
- no corrugated sheet metal buildings like in the first image around there
- i dont think theres a county road K near Marshfield - not in Marathon county at least
fwiw i think this story is neat, but wrong about farmers and their outlooks - agriculture is probably one of the most data-driven industries out there, there are not many family farmers left (the kinds of farmers depicted in this story), it is largely industrial scale at this point.
All that said, as a fictional experiment its pretty cool!
It's a long article and from skimming I see chat of farming, software, GPS. I can't tell whether this is worth investing time to read if I can't even tell what it may be about
It's written like this is a dystopia but billing $180/45 minutes in rural low cost of living area sounds awesome. And the choreographer billing "more than a truck" for three weeks? The dream!
SeriousM•23h ago