Marc Andreessen says the best engineers alive stopped sleeping on purpose, and every one of them calls it the happiest they’ve ever been. Andreessen: “You’re up all night doing AI coding because you’re getting so much done that you can’t turn off. The opportunity cost of going to sleep... is too high.” The body has one price it never negotiates. An hour of this just cleared it. They call them AI vampires now. Twenty agents working the night shift, and one human who refuses to be the bottleneck in his own life. Andreessen: “They’re sleep deprived, they’ve got bags under their eyes, they’re clearly not taking care of themselves. And they’re absolutely ecstatic.” Burnout is exhaustion in the absence of meaning. This is the reverse. Exhaustion from an oversupply. It was supposed to make us obsolete. It made us insatiable. We have only ever met desire in a cage. Uncaged, we call it sickness. Wanting more than you could reach was a wound with no treatment, so we made a virtue of not wanting. Moderation. Contentment. Being realistic. Knowing your limits. Handed down as wisdom. All of it anesthesia for a species that could not afford its own ideas. Underneath the vampires sits a quieter story that does far more damage. A friend on Wall Street. MIT computer science degree, thirty five years ago. Then the market bid higher for his hours, and he put it down for three decades. Andreessen: “He’s picked up coding with AI. He’s completely re-automated his entire house.” Nothing was resurrected. Nothing had ever died. Andreessen: “…in his spare time has generated 500,000 lines of code, just by working with AI.” He never lacked the vision. He lacked the hours. Three decades of wanting with nowhere to put it. Desire doesn’t die when you starve it. It goes quiet, and you start describing it in the past tense. Andreessen: “The coders that are using AI, the estimate is right now that they’re 20 times more productive than they were before they started using AI.” Not twenty percent. Twenty times. He draws the pessimistic case from it himself. Andreessen: “If there’s only a limited amount of software that people want in the world, then yeah, you’re going to get mass unemployment.” One clause in that sentence holds up the entire automation debate. A limited amount that people want. Every number we have on human demand was taken inside a rationing regime. We measured the ideas that could clear a payroll. Everything beneath that line never existed long enough to be counted. The house that works the way you pictured it. The fix nobody else needs. The idea too small to fund and too personal to sell. We spent a century measuring the supply curve and filed the result under human nature. Nobody alive has ever seen what a person wants. Only what they could afford to want. You were never a person with limits. You were a person with prices. Scarcity was never only a constraint. It was an alibi. It let everyone believe the life they never lived was taken from them. I would have, but. There is no but anymore. The vampires aren’t up all night because the machine demands it. They’re up because the thing they always meant to make finally stopped being impossible. You have one too. You’ve just been describing it in the past tense. That was never a verdict on you. It was a price. The price went to zero.show more

Dustin

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