Civilisations in the Americas were significantly less technologically developed than those in Eurasia. We focus our analysis on the Spanish and Portuguese, but the outcome would not have been much different had their place been taken by the Ottoman or the Chinese.
The Mayan and the Aztecs were roughly at a similar level of development as ancient Sumer or Babylon: good agricultural practices, irrigation, astronomy, elaborated culture, rich mythologies, very basic metallurgy, early state structures, etc.
Sumer and Babylon were great civilisations whose legacy can still be traced today. The same is true for the Maya and the Aztec. Had you visited any of them in their prime, you would have been awed by their skill and sophistication.
And yet, think of everything that happened in Eurasia between Hammurabi and Columbus, and you will get a sense of how wide the gap was when the two worlds met.
I'm glad you brought up the contrast between the Aztecs and Ottomans - the majority of South America was inhabited by tribes similar to Native Americans in the North.
The Aztecs are noteworthy because of having an empire to conquer.
I am not suggesting that their civilizations did not have artistic or cultural merit, but I think even in a fictional alternate history where the Spanish decided to peacefully trade with Montezuma, I bet a couple hundred years later these people would've had mechanical looms and walked around in tailored suits just the same as their European counterparts.
Not to speak of an what an empire gaing such powerful technologies and ideas about running society would've done to its neighbors.
What a bunch of nonsense. I really urge you to look into more contemporary research on it.
By which measure were they less advanced? Tenochtitlan had a population of north of 200k when the Spanish arrived - bigger than most European cities at that time, bar a couple. When you read the chronicles of the conquistadores you realise how advanced they were in many ways compared with Europeans.
Th Maya were contemporary to and very similar to Greece in many ways - definitely more advanced in some aspects of mathematics and astronomy, and had an extremely complex architecture.
The gap wasn’t so big, and in some cases American cities were even more advanced - probably the complex sanitation system of most mesoamerican cities contributed to the biggest asymmetry of all - European cities were a Petri dish of filth and disease.
Europe was technologically advanced but lacked in state capacity. The Aztecs and the Maya were the opposite.
Sanitation is a literal stone age technology, originally developed by societies we have very little evidence of. It doesn't require technological sophistication — only a government capable of and willing to administer it.
European middle ages were characterized by the lack of state capacity. Cities and trade declined after the fall of the West Roman Empire. Governments became weak and incapable, and the society was structured around regional warlords and their personal relationships. But technology kept moving on. While European societies had limited resources, they could do things their more capable predecessors could not.
And then, towards the end of the middle ages, states started consolidating again.
Ironically it was that Petri dish of filth and disease which gave the Europeans their largest (unintentional) military advantage in the New World. Of course the horses and steel weapons were also a factor.
Rome during Trajan's rule had over 500k and maybe even 1M people, and ruled half of Europe.
But I would still say that it was a less advanced civilization than Europe in 1500 AD. Trajan's Romans weren't able to sail the oceans, print books, didn't know what gunpowder was and could not use positional numeric system to actually calculate things in abstract; their way of counting stuff was the abacus, which sorta works for everyday tasks, but you cannot develop any higher maths with it. Even steel was non-trivially worse in Roman times than in 1500 AD.
All of that was meaningful progress. Sure, some knowledge was lost (Roman concrete, Greek fire). But much more has been acquired.
China is currently providing weapons for Russia to wage large-scale war in Europe, while supporting a dictatorship in North Korea that regularly launches nuclear-capable misiles in my general direction.
The ”Leader of the Free World” and Commander in Chief of the largest, most well-equipped military force the world has ever seen, with bases dotted around the globe has spent the last several months threatening annexation of my country.
For extra fun, this doesn’t even determine if I live in Greenland or Canada - let alone adding ”Abducting a foreign head of state to lay claim to natural resources”, which could make me Venezuelan!
North Korea is a fire down the block; America is a grease fire in my kitchen, and I hope you'll forgive me for prioritizing the immediate threat
Does that automatically translate into more openings for the people whose full time job is providing that thing? I’m not sure that it does.
Historically, it would seem that often lowering the amount of people needed to produce a good is precisely what makes it cheaper.
So it’s not hard to imagine a world where AI tools make expert software developers significantly more productive while enabling other workers to use their own little programs and automations on their own jobs.
In such a world, the number of “lines of code” being used would be much greater that today.
But it is not clear to me that the amount of people working full time as “software developers“ would be larger as well.
> Does that automatically translate into more openings for the people whose full time job is providing that thing?
Not automatically, no.
How it affects employment depends on the shapes of the relevant supply/demand curves, and I don't think those are possible to know well for things like this.
For the world as a whole, it should be a very positive thing if creating usable software becomes an order of magnitude cheaper, and millions of smart people become available for other work.
Given the products that the software industry is largely focused on building (predatory marketing for the attention economy and surveillance), this unfortunately may be the case.
I debate this in my head way to much & from each & every perspective.
Counter argument - if what you say is true, we will have a lot more custom & personalized software and the tech stacks behind those may be even more complicated than they currently are because we're now wanting to add LLMs that can talk to our APIs. We might also be adding multiple LLMs to our back ends to do things as well. Maybe we're replacing 10 but now someone has to manage that LLM infrastructure as well.
My opinion will change by tomorrow but I could see more people building software that are currently experts in other domains. I can also see software engineers focusing more on keeping the new more complicated architecture being built from falling apart & trying to enforce tech standards. Our roles may become more infra & security. Less features, more stability & security.
If AI tools make expert developers a lot more productive on large software projects, while empowering non-developers to create their own little programs and automations, I am not sure how that would increase the number of people with “software developer” as their full-time job.
It happened with tools like Excel, for example, which matches your description of empowering non-developers. It happens with non-developers setting up a CMS and then, when hitting the limits of what works out of the box, hiring or commissioning developers to add more complex functions and integrations. Barring AGI, there will always be limitations, and hitting them induces the desire to go beyond.
> when hitting the limits of what works out of the box, hiring or commissioning developers to add more complex functions and integrations.
You aren't going to going to do that to AI systems. If, after a couple of weeks you hit the limit of what the AI could do in a million+ LoC, you aren't going to be able to hire a human dev to modify or replace that system for you, because:
1. Humans are going to be needing a ramp up time and that's damn costly (even more costly when there are fewer of them).
2. Where are you going to find humans who can actually code anymore if everyone has been doing this for the last 10 years?
> So, what do you propose non-developers in that situation will be doing then?
Look, I dunno what they will do, but these options are certainly off the table:
1. Get a temp dev/team in to patch a 1m SloC mess
2. Do it cost-effectively.
If the tech has improved by the time this happens (I mean, we're nowhere near this scenario yet, and it has already plateaued) then perhaps they can get the LLM itself to simply rewrite it instead of spending all those valuable tokens reading it in and trying to patch it.
If the tech is not up to it, then their options are effectively:
IMHO people are missing the forest for the trees. The point of this experiment is not to build a functional browser but to develop ways to make agents create large codebases from scratch over a very long time span. A Web browser is just a convenient target because there are lots of documentation, specs and tests available.
The point is to learn how to make very large codebases that don't compile? Why do you need tests and specs if it's not going to even run, much less run correctly?
As discussed elsewhere, it is apparently possible to compile and run this particular project. It seems that whatever process they followed allows commits to break the build pretty often.
Nevertheless, IMHO what’s interesting about this is not the browser itself but rather that AI companies (not just Cursor) are building systems where humans can be out of the loop for days or weeks.
> Nevertheless, IMHO what’s interesting about this is not the browser itself but rather that AI companies (not just Cursor) are building systems where humans can be out of the loop for days or weeks.
But that's not what they demonstrated here. What they demonstrated, so far, is that you can let agents write millions of lines of code, and eventually if you actually need to run it, some human need to "merge the latest snapshot" or do some other management to actually put together the system into a workable state.
Very different from what their original claims were.
...but it didn't develop ways of doing that did it?
Any idiot can have cursor run for 2 weeks and produce a pile of crap that doesn't compile.
You know the brilliant insight they came out with?
> A surprising amount of the system's behavior comes down to how we prompt the agents. Getting them to coordinate well, avoid pathological behaviors, and maintain focus over long periods required extensive experimentation. The harness and models matter, but the prompts matter more.
i.e. It's kind of hard and we didn't really come up with a better solution than 'make sure you write good prompts'.
Wellll, geeeeeeeee! Thanks for that insight guys!
Come on. This was complete BS. Planners and workers. Cool. Details? Any details? Annnnnnnyyyyy way to replicate it? What sort of prompts did you use? How did you solve the pathalogical behaviours?
Nope. The vagueness in this post... it's not an experiment. It's just fund raising hype.
IMHO, this whole thing could be read with "human" instread of "agent" and would make the exact same amount of sense.
"We put 200 human in a room and gave them instructions how to build a browser. They coded for hours, resolving merge conflicts and producing code that did not build in the end without intervention of seniors []. We think, giving them better instructions leads to better results"
So they actually invented humans? And will it come down to either "managing humans" or "managing agents"? One of both will be more reliable, more predictable and more convenient to work with. And my guess is, it is not an agent...
The adoption of AI tools for software development will probably not result in sudden layoffs but rather on harder to measure changes, like smaller teams being able to tackle significantly more ambitious projects than before.
I suspect that another kind of impact is already happening in organisations where AI adoption is uneven: suddenly some employees appear to be having a lot more leisure time while apparently keeping the same productivity as before.
The Mayan and the Aztecs were roughly at a similar level of development as ancient Sumer or Babylon: good agricultural practices, irrigation, astronomy, elaborated culture, rich mythologies, very basic metallurgy, early state structures, etc.
Sumer and Babylon were great civilisations whose legacy can still be traced today. The same is true for the Maya and the Aztec. Had you visited any of them in their prime, you would have been awed by their skill and sophistication.
And yet, think of everything that happened in Eurasia between Hammurabi and Columbus, and you will get a sense of how wide the gap was when the two worlds met.
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