> It is not bold at at all to say K-12 will be eradicated. Higher Ed not so much because many were always buying the status of higher education anyway, so the status in itself still has value as a product.
It’s funny because I believe the opposite for both of these. Living with a teacher, I’ve learned that the most important objectives of k-12 education are teaching kids how to act like adults in society and behave around others. This is something I don’t think AI will ever be good at teaching.
A few other things, like learning to read and write, basic math, critical thinking are secondary, but important, but, I imagine not the best use case for AI either.
Beyond that however, you’re an adult equipped to take learning into your own hands with all the understanding and agency to make it happen. With the help of AI I don’t think there’s much you couldn’t learn, at least that doesn’t require human interaction (e.g. teaching).
Oh it will be even better than humans some day. Not any time soon, and definitely not when the sort of people training these things range from incredibly awkward around people to downright psychotic in public. But the infinite patience and persistence of coding agents in the form of a teacher for other things than code would be pretty amazing, but we're nowhere close to that.
Case in point, I would love to know who thought deploying a figuratively "demilitarized" sexbot as a teacher in NY town in 2026 was a good idea. And I say that as someone who loved the movie Weird Science. And I'm evil enough to admit that Van Halen's Hot For Teacher was the first thing that slipped into my mind reading the article below. But really? Who?
I'm reading The Economy of Cities by Jane Jacobs right now. One of the main theses of the book is that small "inefficient" enterprises are actually the engines of economic grown. Large efficient organizations often lead to stagnation.
It's interesting how this intersects with Tao's point, about the social benefits.
The thing that's so sticky for me with JetBrains IDEs is their run configurations. Being able to configure all of the environment variables etc. for the actual code that I need to run, especially when connecting to a debugger or tests integrated with the IDE.
I haven't seen anyone else complain about this so I figure I must be missing something. Does Zed let you set up run configurations like this? If not, how do users actually run their code? Just in the terminal? It seems backwards to me to use a fancy IDE, but then run all your code in the terminal. I love IDE features like clicking on the test I'm editing to run it, and setting breakpoints in the IDE.
> It seems backwards to me to use a fancy IDE, but then run all your code in the terminal.
Having literally spent days at a time just to get a working run configuration at various employers and clients over the past decade, I find it backwards to use anything besides the terminal and version-controlled scripts & task runners / CLIs to fire up anything. (: People rarely document their JetBrains setup fully and even if they do, JetBrains IDEs are not exactly known for their reproducible behavior or for not occasionally messing up your configuration (in case you do decide to check in your IDE config & share with your team).
Besides, you will need those terminal scripts for your CI pipeline, anyway.
That being said,
> I love IDE features like clicking on the test I'm editing to run it, and setting breakpoints in the IDE.
I agree, that is very useful. However, to me it's the cherry on top of proper self-contained run scripts for the terminal.
Points taken about benefits of run scripts for portability, reproducibility, CI, etc. I'm mostly just trying to find a way to debug arbitrary programs and run tests in the IDE.
Maybe my use case is too specific, but I'll spell it out just in case: I try and open a Django project in Zed. I go to a test file. There's a > arrow next to the test to run or debug, but it will only run it with PyTest (I use unittest, but PyTest is backwards compatible, so w/e). When I try to run it, it fails because some environment variables I need are not set. I don't see how to configure them so I'm dead in the water.
I'd also love to run the Django server with a debugger attached. It's not clear to me how to do that. I haven't found the rights docs. Dead in the water again.
Maybe I need to spend more time exploring and reading the docs :)
Same here. Zeds task configurations are not nearly as versatile, easy to set up and run as pycharms especially when it comes to virtual envs. The debugger is superior in Pycharm too. But in terms of overall use Zed is good.
My other complaint is that pyright (used by Zed) isn’t nearly as good as pycharms type inspection.
I love these too. I have a run config checked into my repo that runs three run configs, for `fastapi dev`, npm start, and launching a JavaScript debugger, with one click. I also like clicking on a test or script and just hitting "ctrl+shift+d" to launch that particular code with the debugger.
VS Code can launch a fleet of dev containers but it's just not as good of an experience to restart and debug.
Do you believe making things easier and more accessible is bad for workers? I don't think it inherently is or isn't, it just depends on who benefits from the increased efficiency. I think that's more of a problem with your economic system, or wealth distribution.
Overall I think we would all be happier if efficient machines take away the drudgery of our daily work and allow us to focus on things that really matter to us. . . as long as our basic needs are met.
As someone who sometimes thinks of themselves as an "optimizer", I feel the opposite take away. I spend too much time "polishing" trying to make something perfect, at the cost of actually getting things done.
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