The AI Mirage: Humanity Is the Only Real Alpha

From late 2024 to late 2025 I’ve been heavily focused on LLMs and coding with them.
In a nutshell, the explosive growth has astounded me, and like many, I felt both excitement and dread.
Combine that with the poor performance of the economy as a whole and it was easy to extrapolate doom and the end of engineering as we knew it.

But after 12 months of experimenting, my opinions have begun to congeal.
LLMs are being oversold, even for coding.
They’re being pitched with promises of a future where all you do is speak a few commands and your app will execute flawlessly.
You can walk away from your screen and just collect the money (everyone is a trillionaire).

“Build me a money-printing machine,” sayeth the engineer, and the LLM builds a marvel of engineering.
“Execute a marketing plan,” sayeth the small business owner, and an agent delivers millions of leads into your perfectly optimized funnel.

I’m calling bullshit on this gospel. I demand to see the securities. “Where is my gold!”

There is no AI heaven, but we’re all willing to live through hell to believe there is.

The fundamentals of business never change, and although there are big gains in efficiency that can be leveraged from LLMs, the hard work never ends.

Engineering will be harder, because to deliver meaningful results you’ll need to dig deeper into tech.
Systems engineers will lead the way, not a JavaScript bro.
We had it too easy for too long. All you needed was to memorize 300 LeetCode problems and you had a job (that was a lie too).
All you needed was to go to college and the job market would be your oyster (ask the class of 2023, 2024, 2025 and see how they feel about that).

Marketing will also be harder because everyone will assume AI slop in every email and every piece of marketing fluff.
The winners will need to sell CDs out of the back of their car trunk again. Hustle culture will be more hustly because the baseline keeps rising.

You’ll need to adopt AI just to be on par, but there will be no edge in AI.
Business, engineering, and love will all require a more human approach.
Technology promised us better relationships and all we got was Tinder, Grindr, and Bumble (ask any single person how they feel about “The Apps,” there is no love).

In the future it is likely true that things will move faster, but the amount of energy needed to achieve results will increase.
As we approach the speed of light, we need more energy to accelerate, there is no free lunch.

AI feels like the Reebok Pump sneakers of the 90s: amazing marketing, but I still couldn’t jump any higher.
And even if I could, that would also mean everyone else could jump half an inch higher with the shoes, and so the basketball hoop would move an inch higher.

The edge lasts only a second. Once everyone has alpha, it’s not alpha.
We are not going into a world of abundance any more than we’re going into a world where I can jump higher.
The hoop keeps moving and the ceiling is a heaven we can’t enter.

We will all be forced into a more human world if we want an edge, because it will be the one thing no one else has.

Be human. No one else is. Being human is contrarian.