This year has been so, so strange.
A friend brought up the Omarchy project in a Slack instance we’re on today. This obviously spurred some discussion — on DHH’s execrable politics (about which I will say no more), but also of the technical merits of the project itself. And here’s what I said about that:
The AI revolution definitely feels like a situation where one is sort of, like…. walking around campus opening the door to each lecture hall to see if it’s cool or not
Everyone in the room (all ex-Block engineers) nodded along with it. But would you nod along with it?
I’m not sure you would! Because there’s a subtext here: “Why am I wandering around campus instead of in a classroom?”
We’re all wandering around campus because something happened to our classroom. We understand it only in part: we were in the audience, not in charge. Some of us left, some of us were kicked out; all of us know that whatever happened was bad. We don’t want to be there wherever it happens again.
We all want someplace to go, though, so we’re wandering around peeping into classrooms. Is this one cool? Can we join it? Is it safe? Are they doing cool stuff that we think is worthwhile? Or has the same fate befallen this place as the one we came from?
In some places, they’re not even aware that what happened to us is a problem. In others, they’re toast and they don’t even know it.
And in some places, I can’t quite tell for sure. Neat things are happening, but… there are red flags from our previous experience.
Are they true red flags? Or maybe just a negative smell?
It might be a false positive. But I would rather walk on by…
That’s what it’s like. Cast out. Ready to work, looking for work to do. But keeping one eye open for an infection whose origins and signs you don’t know for sure.