Also don't smoke or do any of the other things this study didn't control for but do correlate with caffeine consumption in the general population.

Alzheimer's has quite high heritability. A family history seems like sufficient explanation.

I don't think the unit economics are too terrible. Expensive, but not impossible.

200m knowledge workers in US and EU. Total salary around $15T/year.

$1T/year in token spending is about $5k/year per person. A big number, but not totally mad. That's the low end for office space per person for example. Probably close to the existing SaaS spend per person for a lot of roles.

We are still early in the deployment cycle for these tools so I would expect them to get better and also cheaper too.

I disagree. Lots of people are so laser focussed at only the close to the code aspects of programming they are unable to leverage the enormous increase in scope it can offer them.

There is absolutely room for head count reduction while companies restructure around this.

Photoshop (and many traditional SaaS products) solve hundreds of different use cases. Most users probably only care about a handful of them. You don't need to do every use case to kill SaaS if you have a tool that can allow users to solve their 2-3 use cases on their own with custom tooling.

I read all the code I generate with Cursor and some of it smells a bit weird but is easily fixable and most of it is as good as what I would write or better.

I read a bunch of Claude-Code-generated code last week and I was pretty impressed. It followed the established service class paradigm almost as exactly as we'd originally intended. The code was mostly very clean and had copious comments. A big step up from 2025 code.

For the record, I definitely don't immediately read the majority of code Claude writes these days. I just check on it periodicially. In terms of code quality it's as good as any human I know of.

Can be a bumbler at times. So can people.

And it is only the beginning.

Culture wars are not worth anyones time participating in. Stop it.

The current state of the technology is that you must read at least some of the code, but everyone keeps shipping tools that are focussed on churning out more and more stuff without giving you any affordances to really understand the output.

Claude Code in particular seems really uninterested in this aspect of the problem and I've stopped using entirely because of this.

> it's a sort of red pilled book that teaches you how to manipulate people.

This is not an unfair view of the book IMO. While OPs excerpt is lovely, the core of the book is all about getting people to say yes and do things you want them to do.

Carnegie is just so good at this, he's even managed to convince you that he has your best interests at heart by trying to teach you how to do this to people.

I'm sure lots of people felt this way about steam power too.