AI is getting so good

This week my workflow completely changed. For the last year, my workflow has been to sit down with one project, and use AI to do small tasks while I supervise and handhold it the whole way (but at least I don't have to type out all the code). Same way I've always worked, but AI doing the typing.

Starting on Thursday my workflow completely changed. I've been able to work on 4 projects simultaneously. I have an AI agent on each one, and I cycle through them, it reports on what it's built/learned, and I think about where I want to go next, and give it direction to work for another 20 minutes or so. I'm thinking at the level of the project's purpose, high-level structure, business model, etc. I'm not down in the weeds, sometimes I don't even read the code it's writing. So I give some feedback to one AI, it sets off on its next chapter, and I switch to another AI. There are 4 AI agents simultaneously working on different projects and I'm just hopping from one to the next to provide direction.

I've had to change how I think about my role from 'coder' to 'tastemaker' and 'manager'. 
It's so cool to be able to make so much progress on so many projects, it's like Christmas morning every day

I think it's time for people generally to start learning how to use AI. If I can do 4 projects at once now (each at roughly 5x my normal human speed), people who don't use AI at all will be left behind. That's the negative frame. The positive frame is, the barrier to entry to create whatever you want is dropping precipitously!

Now, it's always hard to estimate where you are when things are changing rapidly, and it's easy to over-estimate how fast things are going. Maybe work as we know it for most people won't be that different in a couple years. Maybe it will be totally different. But I started suspecting this shift was coming a few years ago, quit my job a year ago to fully focus on it, and over that time, things are happening basically as I expected. I think AI will continue to improve at minimum for the foreseeable future (~2 years), and will change my workflow to where I can be working on 20-30 projects at a time, while only talking to one AI which oversees them all. Like an AI company. And I think anyone can have that. Not just for coding projects, but all types. So it becomes hard to imagine how much more productive and efficient the economy will be, how much more agency people will have, etc, so many implications. 

So many thoughts about how our governance isn't ready for this, how labor will slowly fade as a way for humans to get ahead (bifurcating society into those who had capital before AI came, and those who didn't), the ease with which a UBI-based society could fall into totalitarianism (which is why I'm building a gardening robot), etc. But those are other topics.