The quote you pulled from Max is the same one which prompted me to comment on his essay. I wrote:
“Admittedly, the widget will only save me 10 or so minutes of busy work every week, but suddenly, a whole host of accumulated but untouched wouldn’t-that-be-nice-to-have ideas for widgets and apps and pages and features has opened itself up to me.”
This captures something I find puzzling—it makes me feel like I inhabit a different universe than many other technology people.
I’ve worked as a software engineer at a global telecommunications company for 25 years. I even run my own email server on OpenBSD. Yet coding and technology aren’t my hobby, they’re my job. When I’m done writing software for the day, I step away from computers. I’ve never accumulated a backlog of little coding projects or ideas for apps and widgets. I don’t need any of that in my life, and I genuinely don’t understand why so many others seem to.
What I actually need is to rewire the electrical system on my sailboat, fix one of my toilets, or repair the small plumbing leak in my basement.
—
I am frequently puzzled by people who seem to have so many “software sized holes” in their lives. It is something I find hard to relate to even though I work in technology and write software for a living.
I've been trying to think about things I would want or need agents for and it's genuinely hard. Maybe it'd be nice to spin up a new website, but the one I have is fine and doesn't get a lot of traffic. Maybe I could do one that compiles these newsletters into an ebook, but only a small handful of people would ever be interested in that.
Re: Different universe, I wonder if the difference is between people who, in general, want to exercise judgment over their lives and decisions and those who just don't want to deal with it. How many of these things recur often enough to want to develop your own agent.
Yes, I have very similar thoughts. I too struggle to imagine what I would need an agent to write code for. If I really think about it, I _can_ come up with things, but it feels kind of forced.
And like I said in the comment above writing software isn’t my hobby but if it was a hobby I think I’d want to actually spend the time writing the software myself because it was fun to do so. The analogy that comes to mind is if I like playing chess as a hobby rather than actually playing chess myself having an agent play chess on my behalf, it doesn’t make any sense to me.
Sidenote, I only just now realized you’re the author of “More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI”, which is literally sitting on the top of my “to read” pile. lol 😝 I have a JD/MA-history and have done a lot of academic history and legal writing but now with the advent of AI, I think a lot about writing practice. And in particular how to help guide my child (he’s only in 3rd grade) towards being a skillful writer.
Here's an "agent idea" that I think would be interesting:
What if you had an agent aggregate all your book recommendations over the years into a spreadsheet. Would do in a way that had the name, gender, year, location (city, state, region), books, authors, of the people requesting recommendations, as well as the author, title, and "why" of the book you recommended.
Think it might be really interesting to see what books and authors have been most frequently cited by people contacting you, what books authors you have recommended the most, and what trends emerges when you segments things by time or gender or region, etc.
That's a good one. I have sometimes longed for a full list of what I've recommended, how often, etc... I tried tracking it for a while like 8-10 years ago and then stopped because I hate that kind of logistical stuff.
I can imagine some good data visualization out of it. I don't know what it would mean, but it would probably be pretty cool at revealing my patterns, reader geography, that kind of thing.
My hesitation would be that I might not want to know that stuff about myself because it would make me self-conscious about what I'm choosing and the whole gestalt of the exercise is that I go from my gut.
There's a subplot in David Lodge's novel "Small World" in which a character (Frobisher) who is an early digital humanist has a computer analyze all his prose, and setting aside common words, his most frequently used word is "grease/greasy/etc" and it throws him into a tailspin.
Many people who might think that they have software-shaped holes in their lives should consider whether they want to have prompt-injection shaped holes in their pocketbooks and personal data.
Thank you, Mr. Warner. I had a hard time sleeping last night after reading about (I couldn't bring myself to read the actual text) "Something Big is Happening" by Matt Shumer. Your post today brought me back to a normal level of stress--that is relative to February 2026. And can I just tell you how much I am enjoying your correspondence with Reece W.? Very much indeed.
It's easy to get ourselves unsettled. I listened to this week's Hard Fork episode while walking the dog this morning and they talked about these things and I started to fret, but I reminded myself that we all have the power to think and act independently when it comes to these issues.
There may be structural changes coming for us, and they may be disruptive, but as individuals we don't have the power to disrupt structural change. But we do have agency inside of these systems. What drives me bonkers is when people cede that agency without considering the implications of that abandonment.
"As more people explore these applications, they too will find the software shaped holes in their lives, but we have to wonder, how numerous, and how big are those holes? What is the true value of filling them?"
It's probably useful to think of this more like Excel (or Lotus 123) and Word (or WordPerfect) and email. Those pieces of software have dramatically changed the day-to-day of office work. Gone are the days of a typing pool, for example, or documents circulating in re-usable letter-sized manila envelopes to accumulate signatures. We are so embedded in the changes that the desktop computer has wrought that we think of this now as The Way Things Have Always Been.
LLMs will eventually do the same thing. They will change the way we work, and some jobs will go the way of the typing pool, but it will probably take us a generation to digest it all.
It would be wise not to over-estimate the scale of the changes that LLMs will drive in the workplace (unless you are trying to score some of that sweet bubble capital), but give it a generation, and you will see real transformations. The first car phone probably seemed like just a way to fill a small "talk on the go" hole in people's lives.
This is basically the stance of team “normal technology” that transformation may be large, but it will take time and fully knowable only in hindsight. But lots of people are predicting these changes in a matter of months, which I just can’t see.
We also have to be mindful about what context goes missing in those transformations. When search took over in academic research I saw how much students stopped understanding how research was meant to work as a process of selection and evaluation. To them it was just putting words in a box on a screen. I had to change how I taught to make sure they understood there was a larger context to putting those words in a box on the screen.
This was excellent, thank you. There seems to be a new wave of AI-catastrophizing and it's always good to find a calmer head. Appreciate the Gary Marcus link as the Shumer post did scare me a little.
All of my writing (and visual art) is based upon my personal memories and observations so I don't see how an LLM could ever create something even close to my creative output. Well, not unless I spend the time giving the LLM every single memory I have and I suppose that might be possible for future generations if they wear some kind of AI spectacles. What a terrible thought.
OK, John, a few things. That airborne toxic event phrase (which was a GREAT story, BTW) rang a bell 🔔, so thanks for reminding us where it is from. I saw the movie of White Noise, but didn't read the book. Should I? I've heard Don DeLillo is good. Also, that Reese W with her books club is a cool customer, isn't she? Didn't rise to the Elle Woods reference and scant compassion for your rodent and disease issues. Still can't believe that the real Reese's legal team is not going medieval on them. And finally, THANK YOU for thinking about AI so I don't have to. Maybe it's terminally lazy of me, but until AI can clean the bathroom and scrub the kitchen floor, I'm not that interested.
Do I know that the handy tool that predicts words for my texts is some version of AI? Yes, I do, and I appreciate it very much. My fingers don't work as fast as the youngsters anymore. Do encounter AI in ways I might not be aware of every day? Probably. I spent a long time helping students (and faculty) understand that "Relevance Ranking" in commercial research databases is simply based on where search terms appear in a record. The tool has no way to know whether the items it retrieves are relevant to the search because it doesn't know what the person wants (even if it can now ask the database a question instead of typing out complicatd Boolean operators - see, told you I was old). Anyway - I'm doing my best to keep up with what's out there, especially what has an impact on college student research/writing, faculty publishing, and other sorts of library related activities. That's exhausting so, no thanks, I think I'll continue to write my staff evaluations, recommendation letters, and thank-you notes.
What I would like to know is who is cleaning the bathtubs of all these people with software-sized holes in their lives, because I am still on my hands and knees scrubbing mine like a goddamned pioneer. And I suspect that most human beings—especially we females of the species—don’t have software-sized holes in our lives but rather bathtub-sized holes, and yet not a single one of these geniuses will ever come up with a way to gift us back that time other than to suggest we offload the work onto other human females. Mierle Laderman Ukeles had it right in 1969 with her Maintenance Art Manifesto: “[A]fter the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?”
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow
This stuff makes me want to pull my eyes out. We don’t “know” if AI is conscious in the same way we don’t “know” if a rock is conscious - this is a level of thinking appropriate for a sixteen-year-old on acid, not someone who feels pretty sure he can probably help build utopia. Maybe he can get Claude to summarize “What is it Like to be a Bat” for him.
The quote you pulled from Max is the same one which prompted me to comment on his essay. I wrote:
“Admittedly, the widget will only save me 10 or so minutes of busy work every week, but suddenly, a whole host of accumulated but untouched wouldn’t-that-be-nice-to-have ideas for widgets and apps and pages and features has opened itself up to me.”
This captures something I find puzzling—it makes me feel like I inhabit a different universe than many other technology people.
I’ve worked as a software engineer at a global telecommunications company for 25 years. I even run my own email server on OpenBSD. Yet coding and technology aren’t my hobby, they’re my job. When I’m done writing software for the day, I step away from computers. I’ve never accumulated a backlog of little coding projects or ideas for apps and widgets. I don’t need any of that in my life, and I genuinely don’t understand why so many others seem to.
What I actually need is to rewire the electrical system on my sailboat, fix one of my toilets, or repair the small plumbing leak in my basement.
—
I am frequently puzzled by people who seem to have so many “software sized holes” in their lives. It is something I find hard to relate to even though I work in technology and write software for a living.
I've been trying to think about things I would want or need agents for and it's genuinely hard. Maybe it'd be nice to spin up a new website, but the one I have is fine and doesn't get a lot of traffic. Maybe I could do one that compiles these newsletters into an ebook, but only a small handful of people would ever be interested in that.
Re: Different universe, I wonder if the difference is between people who, in general, want to exercise judgment over their lives and decisions and those who just don't want to deal with it. How many of these things recur often enough to want to develop your own agent.
Yes, I have very similar thoughts. I too struggle to imagine what I would need an agent to write code for. If I really think about it, I _can_ come up with things, but it feels kind of forced.
And like I said in the comment above writing software isn’t my hobby but if it was a hobby I think I’d want to actually spend the time writing the software myself because it was fun to do so. The analogy that comes to mind is if I like playing chess as a hobby rather than actually playing chess myself having an agent play chess on my behalf, it doesn’t make any sense to me.
Sidenote, I only just now realized you’re the author of “More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI”, which is literally sitting on the top of my “to read” pile. lol 😝 I have a JD/MA-history and have done a lot of academic history and legal writing but now with the advent of AI, I think a lot about writing practice. And in particular how to help guide my child (he’s only in 3rd grade) towards being a skillful writer.

Here's an "agent idea" that I think would be interesting:
What if you had an agent aggregate all your book recommendations over the years into a spreadsheet. Would do in a way that had the name, gender, year, location (city, state, region), books, authors, of the people requesting recommendations, as well as the author, title, and "why" of the book you recommended.
Think it might be really interesting to see what books and authors have been most frequently cited by people contacting you, what books authors you have recommended the most, and what trends emerges when you segments things by time or gender or region, etc.
That's a good one. I have sometimes longed for a full list of what I've recommended, how often, etc... I tried tracking it for a while like 8-10 years ago and then stopped because I hate that kind of logistical stuff.
I can imagine some good data visualization out of it. I don't know what it would mean, but it would probably be pretty cool at revealing my patterns, reader geography, that kind of thing.
My hesitation would be that I might not want to know that stuff about myself because it would make me self-conscious about what I'm choosing and the whole gestalt of the exercise is that I go from my gut.
There's a subplot in David Lodge's novel "Small World" in which a character (Frobisher) who is an early digital humanist has a computer analyze all his prose, and setting aside common words, his most frequently used word is "grease/greasy/etc" and it throws him into a tailspin.
I don't want to accidentally Frobisher myself.
Many people who might think that they have software-shaped holes in their lives should consider whether they want to have prompt-injection shaped holes in their pocketbooks and personal data.
Thank you, Mr. Warner. I had a hard time sleeping last night after reading about (I couldn't bring myself to read the actual text) "Something Big is Happening" by Matt Shumer. Your post today brought me back to a normal level of stress--that is relative to February 2026. And can I just tell you how much I am enjoying your correspondence with Reece W.? Very much indeed.
It's easy to get ourselves unsettled. I listened to this week's Hard Fork episode while walking the dog this morning and they talked about these things and I started to fret, but I reminded myself that we all have the power to think and act independently when it comes to these issues.
There may be structural changes coming for us, and they may be disruptive, but as individuals we don't have the power to disrupt structural change. But we do have agency inside of these systems. What drives me bonkers is when people cede that agency without considering the implications of that abandonment.
"As more people explore these applications, they too will find the software shaped holes in their lives, but we have to wonder, how numerous, and how big are those holes? What is the true value of filling them?"
It's probably useful to think of this more like Excel (or Lotus 123) and Word (or WordPerfect) and email. Those pieces of software have dramatically changed the day-to-day of office work. Gone are the days of a typing pool, for example, or documents circulating in re-usable letter-sized manila envelopes to accumulate signatures. We are so embedded in the changes that the desktop computer has wrought that we think of this now as The Way Things Have Always Been.
LLMs will eventually do the same thing. They will change the way we work, and some jobs will go the way of the typing pool, but it will probably take us a generation to digest it all.
It would be wise not to over-estimate the scale of the changes that LLMs will drive in the workplace (unless you are trying to score some of that sweet bubble capital), but give it a generation, and you will see real transformations. The first car phone probably seemed like just a way to fill a small "talk on the go" hole in people's lives.
This is basically the stance of team “normal technology” that transformation may be large, but it will take time and fully knowable only in hindsight. But lots of people are predicting these changes in a matter of months, which I just can’t see.
We also have to be mindful about what context goes missing in those transformations. When search took over in academic research I saw how much students stopped understanding how research was meant to work as a process of selection and evaluation. To them it was just putting words in a box on a screen. I had to change how I taught to make sure they understood there was a larger context to putting those words in a box on the screen.
This was excellent, thank you. There seems to be a new wave of AI-catastrophizing and it's always good to find a calmer head. Appreciate the Gary Marcus link as the Shumer post did scare me a little.
I think the 'software-shaped hole' reference was from Jasmine Sun: https://open.substack.com/pub/jasmine/p/claude-code?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
All of my writing (and visual art) is based upon my personal memories and observations so I don't see how an LLM could ever create something even close to my creative output. Well, not unless I spend the time giving the LLM every single memory I have and I suppose that might be possible for future generations if they wear some kind of AI spectacles. What a terrible thought.
OK, John, a few things. That airborne toxic event phrase (which was a GREAT story, BTW) rang a bell 🔔, so thanks for reminding us where it is from. I saw the movie of White Noise, but didn't read the book. Should I? I've heard Don DeLillo is good. Also, that Reese W with her books club is a cool customer, isn't she? Didn't rise to the Elle Woods reference and scant compassion for your rodent and disease issues. Still can't believe that the real Reese's legal team is not going medieval on them. And finally, THANK YOU for thinking about AI so I don't have to. Maybe it's terminally lazy of me, but until AI can clean the bathroom and scrub the kitchen floor, I'm not that interested.
I haven’t read White Noise since I first read it in 1991, but I think it’s probably worth it. Very much a touchstone of postmodern lit.
I think these scammers are all too small time for big time people to take notice of them. They probably count on that.
Do I know that the handy tool that predicts words for my texts is some version of AI? Yes, I do, and I appreciate it very much. My fingers don't work as fast as the youngsters anymore. Do encounter AI in ways I might not be aware of every day? Probably. I spent a long time helping students (and faculty) understand that "Relevance Ranking" in commercial research databases is simply based on where search terms appear in a record. The tool has no way to know whether the items it retrieves are relevant to the search because it doesn't know what the person wants (even if it can now ask the database a question instead of typing out complicatd Boolean operators - see, told you I was old). Anyway - I'm doing my best to keep up with what's out there, especially what has an impact on college student research/writing, faculty publishing, and other sorts of library related activities. That's exhausting so, no thanks, I think I'll continue to write my staff evaluations, recommendation letters, and thank-you notes.
What I would like to know is who is cleaning the bathtubs of all these people with software-sized holes in their lives, because I am still on my hands and knees scrubbing mine like a goddamned pioneer. And I suspect that most human beings—especially we females of the species—don’t have software-sized holes in our lives but rather bathtub-sized holes, and yet not a single one of these geniuses will ever come up with a way to gift us back that time other than to suggest we offload the work onto other human females. Mierle Laderman Ukeles had it right in 1969 with her Maintenance Art Manifesto: “[A]fter the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?”
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow
This stuff makes me want to pull my eyes out. We don’t “know” if AI is conscious in the same way we don’t “know” if a rock is conscious - this is a level of thinking appropriate for a sixteen-year-old on acid, not someone who feels pretty sure he can probably help build utopia. Maybe he can get Claude to summarize “What is it Like to be a Bat” for him.