No, local models will not win
Read it on seangoedecke.com Every time a new open-weight AI model is released, people say that local models are the future. Why spend billions of dollars...
Advanced AI sycophancy
Read it on seangoedecke.com Everyone knows that AI sycophancy is when the model tells you how smart you are. Wow, you’re absolutely right. That’s not just a...
I got an email about resistance
Read it on seangoedecke.com This will be kind of an unusual post. I got a recent email about my writing that I thought was such a good articulation of one...
How to keep thinking
Read it on seangoedecke.com Imagine you’re the guest on some kind of frenetic, software-engineering-themed game show. The host is constantly flipping over...
Giving and taking credit in big tech companies
Read it on seangoedecke.com Engineers often complain that visibility should be their manager’s job. In other words, they think engineers should be able to...
AI models need moral support to make discoveries
Read it on seangoedecke.com One recent development in AI is its ability to solve some long-standing problems in mathematics. In 2024 and 2025, this was a...
You don't have to be smart if you can think clearly
Read it on seangoedecke.com When you’re on fire, problems are transparent: they’re solved simply by the act of looking at them. Even complicated layers of...
LLMs reward expertise
Read it on seangoedecke.com In the 2010s, if you had technical gaps (say, you couldn’t write CSS), you had to either rely on a skilled colleague or just hope...
AIs might escape containment by releasing themselves as open-weight models
Read it on seangoedecke.com Before large language models, people who worried about AI safety often talked about the “boxing problem”. It goes like this....
Impro is a handbook for running a cult
Read it on seangoedecke.com Here’s the big idea in Keith Johnstone’s book Impro: Children are naturally creative, but are violently formed into repressed...
Overtraining as the path to human-like AI
Read it on seangoedecke.com The anonymous blogger Gwern recently completed a thirteen thousand word post called Human-like Neural Nets by Catapulting, in...
What does "playing politics" mean for software engineers?
Read it on seangoedecke.com Software engineers are often told to “start playing politics”, but most engineers have no idea what that means. Their reference...
In defense of not understanding your codebase
Read it on seangoedecke.com As a software engineer, how well do you have to understand your own codebase? My guess is that people who work on small codebases...
Blog about things you don't understand yet
Read it on seangoedecke.com Every post I publish represents at least two things I’ve learned: the thing that prompted me to write the post, and the thing I...
C2PA only works if everything is signed
Read it on seangoedecke.com The European Union AI Act is Europe’s attempt to comprehensively regulate AI usage. A big part of that is the requirement that...
Text AI watermarks will always be trivial to remove
Read it on seangoedecke.com The European Union AI Act will begin to be enforceable in August 2026, one month from now1. One of the biggest new requirements...
Saying the obvious thing
Read it on seangoedecke.com Stating the obvious is surprisingly useful. Most of your knowledge lives below the threshold of conscious awareness, so it’s...
AI inference is obviously profitable
Read it on seangoedecke.com Many people claim that AI inference is unprofitable to serve, and thus must be subsidized by an ocean of dumb money from...
AI GPUs probably live longer than three years
Read it on seangoedecke.com People who think current AI use is unsustainable often rely on the claim that inference GPUs only last “three years at the most”...
Working with product managers
Read it on seangoedecke.com The relationship engineers have with product management is more dysfunctional than with any other part of the company. There’s no...
