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To join the 'Convert Encounters the Catechism' please subscribe to the channel. & Welcome! Gavin Ashenden.\u2219 1 min read () (https://www.thefp.com/p/i-posted-on-x-the-british-police?utm_source=%2Finbox%2Fpost%2F172538377&utm_medium=reader2) (The Free Press) (https://www.thefp.com) The Free Press Sep 3 \u2018I Posted on X. The British Police Arrested Me.\u2019 Plus. . . Graham Linehan on being thrown in a cell for a tweet. Brendan O\u2019Neill on the UK\u2019s working-class revolt. Jonathan Haidt joins The Free Press. And much more. The Free Press\u2219 5 min read () (https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/my-arrest-as-it-happened?utm_source=%2Finbox%2Fpost%2F172538377&utm_medium=reader2) (The Glinner Update) (https://grahamlinehan.substack.com) The Glinner Update Sep 3 My arrest, as it happened I forgot I had this! 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Simplicius\u2219 8 min read () (https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-2-2025?utm_source=%2Finbox%2Fpost%2F172538377&utm_medium=reader2) (User) (User's avatar) (https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com) Letters from an American Sep 3 September 2, 2025 In the early hours of Sunday morning, in the middle of a three-day holiday weekend, the Trump administration attempted to take children out of government custody and ship them alone to their country of origin, Guatemala. Heather Cox Richardson\u2219 9 min read (https://www.meidasplus.com/p/exclusive-rep-ro-khanna-previews?utm_source=%2Finbox%2Fpost%2F172538377&utm_medium=reader2) (Meidas+) (https://www.meidasplus.com) Meidas+ Sep 3 Exclusive: Rep. Ro Khanna Previews Press Conference with Epstein Survivors Trump\u2019s cover-up scheme is on full display as bipartisan members of Congress join Epstein survivors to demand real accountability. Rep. Ro Khanna joins to discuss tomorrow's historic press conference. MeidasTouch Network and Ben Meiselas\u2219 14 min watch () (https://www.thefp.com/p/how-a-russian-spy-destroyed-a-beautiful?utm_source=%2Finbox%2Fpost%2F172538377&utm_medium=reader2) (The Free Press) (https://www.thefp.com) The Free Press Sep 3 How a Russian Spy Destroyed a Beautiful Mind Listen now: Russia\u2019s information war against the West is a century-old mind game that still warps American politics. 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The Vintage Read Show\u2219 3 min read () (https://aaronparnas.substack.com/p/a-conversation-with-katie-couric?utm_source=%2Finbox%2Fpost%2F172538377&utm_medium=reader2) (The Parnas Perspective) (https://aaronparnas.substack.com) The Parnas Perspective Sep 3 A Conversation with Katie Couric: Lessons on Journalism, Politics, and Resilience Today, I interviewed one of my idols. Thank you for making it happen. Aaron Parnas and Katie Couric\u2219 39 min watch () (https://zeteo.com/p/this-has-nothing-to-do-with-crime?utm_source=%2Finbox%2Fpost%2F172538377&utm_medium=reader2) (Zeteo) (https://zeteo.com) Zeteo Sep 3 'The Trump Health Cover-Up': Mehdi and Jim Acosta Slam the Mainstream Media's Complicity in a Huge Scandal The former MSNBC and CNN anchors discuss Trump's health issues, the prospects of a JD Vance presidency, and the latest threats to deploy the National Guard to Chicago. Mehdi Hasan, Jim Acosta, and Team Zeteo\u2219 23 min watch () (https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/gaza-city-rantisi-children-hospital-malnutrition?utm_source=%2Finbox%2Fpost%2F172538377&utm_medium=reader2) (Drop Site News) (https://www.dropsitenews.com) Drop Site News Sep 2 Gaza\u2019s Last Functioning Children\u2019s Hospital \u201cMy child should be in a safe, clean place, getting proper treatment. But here I am, on the floor, with no place to sit.\u201d Abdel Qader Sabbah\u2219 7 min read () (https://www.meidasplus.com/p/trumps-dangerous-plan-to-put-troops?utm_source=%2Finbox%2Fpost%2F172538377&utm_medium=reader2) (Meidas+) (https://www.meidasplus.com) Meidas+ Sep 2 Trump\u2019s Dangerous Plan to Put Troops on Our Streets Trump\u2019s push to deploy troops in our cities isn\u2019t about safety, but a political weapon that threatens democracy itself, writes Meghan Hays, Democratic strategist and former Biden aide. MeidasTouch Network\u2219 2 min read () (https://aaronparnas.substack.com/p/breaking-no-kings-day-20-coming-and?utm_source=%2Finbox%2Fpost%2F172538377&utm_medium=reader2) (The Parnas Perspective) (https://aaronparnas.substack.com) The Parnas Perspective Sep 2 BREAKING: No Kings Day 2.0 Coming and Trump Conducts Military Strikes in Caribbean No Kings Day 2.0 is coming, the military launches strikes in the Caribbean, Trump appears with another bruise during his press conference, and Court strikes down Trump's national guard deployment Aaron Parnas\u2219 8 min watch () Get app (https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com) (Mike Judge) Subscribe (https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com) Mike Judge (https://substack.com/home/post/p-172538377) Where's the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don't Add Up (/@mikelovesrobots) (Mike Judge) (Mike Judge's avatar) (https://substack.com/@mikelovesrobots) Mike Judge Sep 03, 2025 I\u2019m furious. I\u2019m really angry. I\u2019m angry in a knocking down sandcastles and punching Daniel LaRusso in the face and talking smack about him to his girl kind of way. I\u2019m not an angry person generally, but I can\u2019t stand what\u2019s happening to my industry. I know software development. I\u2019ve been doing it for 25 years, maybe even 28 years (https://substack.com/inbox/post/172538377#footnote-1-172538377) 1 if you count market research tabulation on amber monochrome screens. Yes, I\u2019m old. I\u2019m a middle-aged programming nerd. My entire life and personal identity are wrapped up in this programming thing for better or worse. I thrive off the dopamine hits from shipping cool things. I was an early adopter of AI coding and a fan until maybe two months ago, when I read the (https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/) METR study and suddenly got serious doubts. In that study, the authors discovered that developers were unreliable narrators of their own productivity. They thought AI was making them 20% faster, but it was actually making them 19% slower. This shocked me because I had just told someone the week before that I thought AI was only making me about 25% faster, and I was bummed it wasn\u2019t a higher number. I was only off by 5% from the developer\u2019s own incorrect estimates. This was unsettling. It was impossible not to question if I too were an unreliable narrator of my own experience. Was I hoodwinked by the screens of code flying by and had no way of quantifying whether all that reading and reviewing of code actually took more time in the first place than just doing the thing myself? So, I started testing my own productivity using a modified methodology from that study. I\u2019d take a task and I\u2019d estimate how long it would take to code if I were doing it by hand, and then I\u2019d flip a coin, heads I\u2019d use AI, and tails I\u2019d just do it myself. Then I\u2019d record when I started and when I ended. That would give me the delta, and I could use the delta to build AI vs no AI charts, and I\u2019d see some trends. I ran that for six weeks, recording all that data, and do you know what I discovered? (https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!DPg1!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F53c83842-05e1-4ca1-9021-c292e8f3a502_600x371.png) () I discovered that the data isn\u2019t statistically significant at any meaningful level. That I would need to record new datapoints for another four months just to prove if AI was speeding me up or slowing me down at all. It\u2019s too neck-in-neck. That lack of differentiation between the groups is really interesting though. Yes, it\u2019s a limited sample and could be chance, but also so far AI appears to slow me down by a median of 21%, exactly in line with the METR study. I can say definitively that I\u2019m not seeing any massive increase in speed (i.e., 2x) using AI coding tools. If I were, the results would be statistically significant and the study would be over. That\u2019s really disappointing. I wish the AI coding dream were true. I wish I could make every dumb coding idea I ever had a reality. I wish I could make a fretboard learning app on Monday, a Korean trainer on Wednesday, and a video game on Saturday. I\u2019d release them all. I\u2019d drown the world in a flood of shovelware like the world had never seen. Well, I would \u2014 if it worked. It turns out, though, and I\u2019ve collected a lot of data on this, it doesn\u2019t just not work for me, it doesn\u2019t work for anyone , and I\u2019m going to prove that. But first, let\u2019s examine how extreme and widespread these productivity claims are. Cursor\u2019s tagline is \u201cBuilt to make you extraordinarily productive.\u201d Claude Code\u2019s is \u201cBuild Better Software Faster.\u201d GitHub Copilot\u2019s is \u201cDelegate like a boss.\u201d Google says their LLMs make their developers 25% faster. OpenAI makes their own bombastic claims about their coding efficiencies and studies (https://substack.com/inbox/post/172538377#footnote-2-172538377) 2 . And my fellow developers themselves are no better, with 14% claiming they\u2019re seeing a 10x increase in output due to AI. (https://substack.com/inbox/post/172538377#footnote-3-172538377) 3 \u201cDelegate like a boss\u201d \u2013 Github Copilot These claims wouldn't matter if the topic weren't so deadly serious. Tech leaders everywhere are buying into the FOMO, convinced their competitors are getting massive gains they're missing out on. This drives them to rebrand as AI-First companies (https://substack.com/inbox/post/172538377#footnote-4-172538377) 4 , justify layoffs with newfound productivity narratives, and lowball developer salaries under the assumption that AI has fundamentally changed the value equation. And yet, despite the most widespread adoption one could imagine (https://substack.com/inbox/post/172538377#footnote-5-172538377) 5 , these tools don\u2019t work . My argument: If so many developers are so extraordinarily productive using these tools, where is the flood of shovelware? We should be seeing apps of all shapes and sizes, video games, new websites, mobile apps, software-as-a-service apps \u2014 we should be drowning in choice. We should be in the middle of an indie software revolution. We should be seeing 10,000 Tetris clones on Steam. Consider this: with all you know about AI-assisted coding and its wide adoption, if I showed you charts and graphs of new software releases across the world, what shape of that graph would you expect? Surely you\u2019d be seeing an exponential growth up-and-to-the-right as adoption took hold and people started producing more? Now, I\u2019ve spent a lot of money and weeks putting the data for this article together, processing tens of terabytes of data in some cases. So I hope you appreciate how utterly uninspiring and flat these charts are across every major sector of software development. (https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5F2-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F79dbad0e-04eb-4fb8-b114-613754379bd2_2428x1288.png) () () from (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1020964/apple-app-store-app-releases-worldwide/) Statista (https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!MQQk!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6886f9ed-e545-48ba-a6c0-a7b31aa7813b_2454x1372.png) () from (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1020956/android-app-releases-worldwide/) Statista (https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xhVj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd70b517d-c59b-4cb8-8b4f-7e5ee58f0424_632x568.png) () from (https://www.dnib.com/dashboards/global-domain-name-base-trends) Domain Name Industry Brief by Verisign (https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!No7i!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7adbd0a6-61c0-40a7-8c3a-b436421aa4f0_656x408.png) () From (https://steamdb.info/) SteamDB (https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!eBmO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4e23e3e0-d046-4b58-ab6d-bb8e78d38493_664x415.png) () I spent $70 on BigQuery processing to make this chart. Via (https://www.gharchive.org/) GH Archive The most interesting thing about these charts is what they\u2019re not showing. They\u2019re not showing a sudden spike or hockey-stick line of growth. They\u2019re flat at best. There\u2019s no shovelware surge. There\u2019s no sudden indie boom occurring post-2022/2023. You could not tell looking at these charts when AI-assisted coding became widely adopted. The core premise is flawed. Nobody is shipping more than before. The impact on human lives is incredible. People are being fired because they\u2019re not adopting these tools fast enough (https://substack.com/inbox/post/172538377#footnote-6-172538377) 6 . People are sitting in jobs they don\u2019t like because they\u2019re afraid if they go somewhere else it\u2019ll be worse. People are spending all this time trying to get good at prompting and feeling bad because they\u2019re failing. This whole thing is bullshit. So if you're a developer feeling pressured to adopt these tools \u2014 by your manager, your peers, or the general industry hysteria \u2014 trust your gut. If these tools feel clunky, if they're slowing you down, if you're confused how other people can be so productive, you're not broken. The data backs up what you're experiencing. You're not falling behind by sticking with what you know works. If you\u2019re feeling brave, show your manager these charts and ask them what they think about it. If you take away anything from this it should be that (A) developers aren't shipping anything more than they were before (that\u2019s the only metric that matters), and (B) if someone \u2014 whether it's your CEO, your tech lead, or some Reddit dork \u2014 claims they're now a 10xer because of AI, that\u2019s almost assuredly untrue, demand they show receipts or shut the fuck up. Now, I know the internet. I know what many of you chumps are going to say before you even say it, so let\u2019s just get into it: \u201cWell, if you just learned how to prompt properly, then you would be a 10x engineer like me.\u201d Look at the data. There are no new 10xers. If there were \u2014 if the 14% of self-proclaimed AI 10xers were actually 10xers \u2014 that would more than double the worldwide output of new software. That didn\u2019t happen. And as for you, personally, show me the 30 apps you created this year. I\u2019m not entertaining this without receipts. \u201cWell, it\u2019s a new technology and so much is invested, and it takes time\u2026\u201d Yes, billions of dollars have been invested in these tools. Billions of dollars will continue to be invested in these tools. The problem is that they\u2019re being sold and decisions are being made about them \u2014 which affect real people\u2019s lives \u2014 as if they work today. Don\u2019t parrot that nonsense to me that it\u2019s a work in progress. It\u2019s September 2025, and we\u2019ve had these tools for years now, and they still suck. Someday, maybe they won\u2019t suck, but we'd better see objective proof of them having an impact on actually shipping things on the large. \u201cWell, maybe it kind of sucks now, but if you don\u2019t adopt it early, you\u2019ll be left behind.\u201d There are no indicators that prompting is hard to learn. Github Copilot themselves say that (https://github.blog/news-insights/research/the-economic-impact-of-the-ai-powered-developer-lifecycle-and-lessons-from-github-copilot/) initially, users only accept 29% of prompted coding suggestions (which itself is a wild claim to inefficiency, why would you publicize that?), but with six months of experience, users naturally get better at prompting and that grows to a whopping 34% acceptance rate. Apparently, 6 months of experience only makes you 5% better at prompting. \u201cWell, maybe quality is going up and things aren\u2019t necessarily shipping faster\u2026\u201d That doesn\u2019t make any sense. We all know that the industry has taken a step back in terms of code quality by at least a decade. Hardly anyone tests anymore. The last time I heard the phrase \u201ccontinuous improvement\u201d or \u201ctest-driven development\u201d was before COVID. You know as well as I do that if there\u2019s a tool that can make people 10x coders, we\u2019d be drowning in shovelware. \u201cWell, it\u2019s all website-driven, and people don\u2019t really care about domain names these days; it\u2019s all subdomains on sites like Vercel.\u201d Shut up. People love their ego domains. \u201cWell, .ai domain names are up 47% this year\u2026\u201d Yeah, that\u2019s cause all the startups pivoted to AI. It\u2019s the only way to get money out of investor FOMO. Has the overall amount of domain names gone up at an unprecedented rate, though? No, it hasn\u2019t. Look at the new domains chart. \u201cWell, if you were a real engineer, you\u2019d know that most of software development is not writing code.\u201d That\u2019s only true when you\u2019re in a large corporation. When you\u2019re by yourself, when you\u2019re the stakeholder as well as the developer, you\u2019re not in meetings. You're telling me that people aren\u2019t shipping anything solo anymore? That people aren\u2019t shipping new GitHub projects that scratch a personal itch? How does software creation not involve code? Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. (https://substack.com/inbox/post/172538377) (https://substack.com/inbox/post/172538377) (https://substack.com/inbox/post/172538377) (subscribe-widget-preamble) (6140394) (Type your email...) Subscribe (https://substack.com/inbox/post/172538377#footnote-anchor-1-172538377) 1 28 years of experience is approximately 55,000 hours. I thought that was a fun metric. (https://substack.com/inbox/post/172538377#footnote-anchor-2-172538377) 2 Sam Altman says programmers are currently \"10 times more productive\" with AI coding. And that the world wants\"100 times maybe a thousand times more software.\" (I agree there.) Altman also predicts programmers will \"make three times as much\" in the future. From (https://www.finalroundai.com/blog/sam-altman-says-world-wants-1000x-more-software) https://www.finalroundai.com/blog/sam-altman-says-world-wants-1000x-more-software (https://substack.com/inbox/post/172538377#footnote-anchor-3-172538377) 3 78% of developers using AI report productivity gains, with 17% of those (13-14% of total developers surveyed) claiming a \u201c10\u00d7\u201d increase in output from AI - (http://qodo.ai/reports/state-of-ai-code-quality) http://qodo.ai/reports/state-of-ai-code-quality (https://substack.com/inbox/post/172538377#footnote-anchor-4-172538377) 4 Funny to me how none of these \u201cAI First\u201d coding shops reportedly provide any training on how to become a 10xer with AI coding. \u201cExperiment and figure it out yourself\u201d is the common advice. Meanwhile, the (https://cookbook.openai.com/examples/gpt-5/gpt-5_prompting_guide) official (https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/prompt-engineering) prompting (https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-practices) guides are apparently not worth paying attention to because they don\u2019t work.\u00a0You see the dissonance, right? (https://substack.com/inbox/post/172538377#footnote-anchor-5-172538377) 5 60% of developers report using AI coding tools daily, and 82% use AI coding tools at least weekly. - (http://qodo.ai/reports/state-of-ai-code-quality) http://qodo.ai/reports/state-of-ai-code-quality (https://substack.com/inbox/post/172538377#footnote-anchor-6-172538377) 6 The Coinbase CEO fired engineers last week who would not use Cursor or Copilot - (https://www.finalroundai.com/blog/coinbase-ceo-fired-engineers-for-not-using-ai-tools) https://www.finalroundai.com/blog/coinbase-ceo-fired-engineers-for-not-using-ai-tools Subscribe to Mike Judge Launched 12 hours ago (https://substack.com/inbox/post/172538377) (https://substack.com/inbox/post/172538377) (https://substack.com/inbox/post/172538377) (post-end-cta) (6140394) (Type your email...) 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Please (https://enable-javascript.com/) turn on JavaScript or unblock scripts " ], "output": "htmltotext.txt", "pwd": "/data/archive/1756956198.271156", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2025-09-04T03:24:07.290873+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "media": [ { "cmd": [ "/usr/local/bin/yt-dlp", "--restrict-filenames", "--trim-filenames", "128", "--write-description", "--write-info-json", "--write-annotations", "--write-thumbnail", "--no-call-home", "--write-sub", "--write-auto-subs", "--convert-subs=srt", "--yes-playlist", "--continue", "--no-abort-on-error", "--ignore-errors", "--geo-bypass", "--add-metadata", "--format=(bv*+ba/b)[filesize<=750m][filesize_approx<=?750m]/(bv*+ba/b)", "--skip-download", "--cache-dir=/data/yt-dlp-cache/", "--cookies=/data/yt-dlp-cache/cookies.txt", "--proxy=socks5://tor-socks-proxy:9150", "--no-playlist", "https://substack.com/inbox/post/172538377" ], "cmd_version": "2024.10.7", "end_ts": "2025-09-04T03:24:12.549215+00:00", "index_texts": [], "output": "ArchiveError: Failed to save media", "pwd": "/data/archive/1756956198.271156", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2025-09-04T03:24:08.958033+00:00", "status": "failed" } ], "mercury": [ { "cmd": [ "/home/archivebox/.npm/bin/postlight-parser", "https://substack.com/inbox/post/172538377" ], "cmd_version": "2.2.3", "end_ts": "2025-09-04T03:24:07.262419+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "mercury/", "pwd": "/data/archive/1756956198.271156", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2025-09-04T03:24:02.438319+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "pdf": [], "readability": [ { "cmd": [ "/home/archivebox/.npm/bin/readability-extractor", "/tmp/tmpdb27td7i", "https://substack.com/inbox/post/172538377" ], "cmd_version": "0.0.11", "end_ts": "2025-09-04T03:23:54.745501+00:00", "index_texts": [ "I\u2019m furious. I\u2019m really angry. I\u2019m angry in a knocking down sandcastles and punching Daniel LaRusso in the face and talking smack about him to his girl kind of way.I\u2019m not an angry person generally, but I can\u2019t stand what\u2019s happening to my industry. I know software development. I\u2019ve been doing it for 25 years, maybe even 28 years1 if you count market research tabulation on amber monochrome screens. Yes, I\u2019m old. I\u2019m a middle-aged programming nerd. My entire life and personal identity are wrapped up in this programming thing for better or worse. I thrive off the dopamine hits from shipping cool things.I was an early adopter of AI coding and a fan until maybe two months ago, when I read the METR study and suddenly got serious doubts. In that study, the authors discovered that developers were unreliable narrators of their own productivity. They thought AI was making them 20% faster, but it was actually making them 19% slower. This shocked me because I had just told someone the week before that I thought AI was only making me about 25% faster, and I was bummed it wasn\u2019t a higher number. I was only off by 5% from the developer\u2019s own incorrect estimates.This was unsettling. It was impossible not to question if I too were an unreliable narrator of my own experience. Was I hoodwinked by the screens of code flying by and had no way of quantifying whether all that reading and reviewing of code actually took more time in the first place than just doing the thing myself?So, I started testing my own productivity using a modified methodology from that study. I\u2019d take a task and I\u2019d estimate how long it would take to code if I were doing it by hand, and then I\u2019d flip a coin, heads I\u2019d use AI, and tails I\u2019d just do it myself. Then I\u2019d record when I started and when I ended. That would give me the delta, and I could use the delta to build AI vs no AI charts, and I\u2019d see some trends. I ran that for six weeks, recording all that data, and do you know what I discovered?I discovered that the data isn\u2019t statistically significant at any meaningful level. That I would need to record new datapoints for another four months just to prove if AI was speeding me up or slowing me down at all. It\u2019s too neck-in-neck.That lack of differentiation between the groups is really interesting though. Yes, it\u2019s a limited sample and could be chance, but also so far AI appears to slow me down by a median of 21%, exactly in line with the METR study. I can say definitively that I\u2019m not seeing any massive increase in speed (i.e., 2x) using AI coding tools. If I were, the results would be statistically significant and the study would be over.That\u2019s really disappointing.I wish the AI coding dream were true. I wish I could make every dumb coding idea I ever had a reality. I wish I could make a fretboard learning app on Monday, a Korean trainer on Wednesday, and a video game on Saturday. I\u2019d release them all. I\u2019d drown the world in a flood of shovelware like the world had never seen. Well, I would \u2014 if it worked.It turns out, though, and I\u2019ve collected a lot of data on this, it doesn\u2019t just not work for me, it doesn\u2019t work for anyone, and I\u2019m going to prove that.But first, let\u2019s examine how extreme and widespread these productivity claims are. Cursor\u2019s tagline is \u201cBuilt to make you extraordinarily productive.\u201d Claude Code\u2019s is \u201cBuild Better Software Faster.\u201d GitHub Copilot\u2019s is \u201cDelegate like a boss.\u201d Google says their LLMs make their developers 25% faster. OpenAI makes their own bombastic claims about their coding efficiencies and studies2. And my fellow developers themselves are no better, with 14% claiming they\u2019re seeing a 10x increase in output due to AI.3\u201cDelegate like a boss\u201d \u2013 Github CopilotThese claims wouldn't matter if the topic weren't so deadly serious. Tech leaders everywhere are buying into the FOMO, convinced their competitors are getting massive gains they're missing out on. This drives them to rebrand as AI-First companies4, justify layoffs with newfound productivity narratives, and lowball developer salaries under the assumption that AI has fundamentally changed the value equation.And yet, despite the most widespread adoption one could imagine5, these tools don\u2019t work.My argument: If so many developers are so extraordinarily productive using these tools, where is the flood of shovelware? We should be seeing apps of all shapes and sizes, video games, new websites, mobile apps, software-as-a-service apps \u2014 we should be drowning in choice. We should be in the middle of an indie software revolution. We should be seeing 10,000 Tetris clones on Steam.Consider this: with all you know about AI-assisted coding and its wide adoption, if I showed you charts and graphs of new software releases across the world, what shape of that graph would you expect? Surely you\u2019d be seeing an exponential growth up-and-to-the-right as adoption took hold and people started producing more?Now, I\u2019ve spent a lot of money and weeks putting the data for this article together, processing tens of terabytes of data in some cases. So I hope you appreciate how utterly uninspiring and flat these charts are across every major sector of software development. I spent $70 on BigQuery processing to make this chart. Via GH ArchiveThe most interesting thing about these charts is what they\u2019re not showing. They\u2019re not showing a sudden spike or hockey-stick line of growth. They\u2019re flat at best. There\u2019s no shovelware surge. There\u2019s no sudden indie boom occurring post-2022/2023. You could not tell looking at these charts when AI-assisted coding became widely adopted. The core premise is flawed. Nobody is shipping more than before.The impact on human lives is incredible. People are being fired because they\u2019re not adopting these tools fast enough6. People are sitting in jobs they don\u2019t like because they\u2019re afraid if they go somewhere else it\u2019ll be worse. People are spending all this time trying to get good at prompting and feeling bad because they\u2019re failing.This whole thing is bullshit.So if you're a developer feeling pressured to adopt these tools \u2014 by your manager, your peers, or the general industry hysteria \u2014 trust your gut. If these tools feel clunky, if they're slowing you down, if you're confused how other people can be so productive, you're not broken. The data backs up what you're experiencing. You're not falling behind by sticking with what you know works. If you\u2019re feeling brave, show your manager these charts and ask them what they think about it.If you take away anything from this it should be that (A) developers aren't shipping anything more than they were before (that\u2019s the only metric that matters), and (B) if someone \u2014 whether it's your CEO, your tech lead, or some Reddit dork \u2014 claims they're now a 10xer because of AI, that\u2019s almost assuredly untrue, demand they show receipts or shut the fuck up.Now, I know the internet. I know what many of you chumps are going to say before you even say it, so let\u2019s just get into it:\u201cWell, if you just learned how to prompt properly, then you would be a 10x engineer like me.\u201dLook at the data. There are no new 10xers. If there were \u2014 if the 14% of self-proclaimed AI 10xers were actually 10xers \u2014 that would more than double the worldwide output of new software. That didn\u2019t happen. And as for you, personally, show me the 30 apps you created this year. I\u2019m not entertaining this without receipts.\u201cWell, it\u2019s a new technology and so much is invested, and it takes time\u2026\u201dYes, billions of dollars have been invested in these tools. Billions of dollars will continue to be invested in these tools. The problem is that they\u2019re being sold and decisions are being made about them \u2014 which affect real people\u2019s lives \u2014 as if they work today. Don\u2019t parrot that nonsense to me that it\u2019s a work in progress. It\u2019s September 2025, and we\u2019ve had these tools for years now, and they still suck. Someday, maybe they won\u2019t suck, but we'd better see objective proof of them having an impact on actually shipping things on the large.\u201cWell, maybe it kind of sucks now, but if you don\u2019t adopt it early, you\u2019ll be left behind.\u201dThere are no indicators that prompting is hard to learn. Github Copilot themselves say that initially, users only accept 29% of prompted coding suggestions (which itself is a wild claim to inefficiency, why would you publicize that?), but with six months of experience, users naturally get better at prompting and that grows to a whopping 34% acceptance rate. Apparently, 6 months of experience only makes you 5% better at prompting.\u201cWell, maybe quality is going up and things aren\u2019t necessarily shipping faster\u2026\u201dThat doesn\u2019t make any sense. We all know that the industry has taken a step back in terms of code quality by at least a decade. Hardly anyone tests anymore. The last time I heard the phrase \u201ccontinuous improvement\u201d or \u201ctest-driven development\u201d was before COVID. You know as well as I do that if there\u2019s a tool that can make people 10x coders, we\u2019d be drowning in shovelware.\u201cWell, it\u2019s all website-driven, and people don\u2019t really care about domain names these days; it\u2019s all subdomains on sites like Vercel.\u201dShut up. People love their ego domains.\u201cWell, .ai domain names are up 47% this year\u2026\u201dYeah, that\u2019s cause all the startups pivoted to AI. It\u2019s the only way to get money out of investor FOMO. Has the overall amount of domain names gone up at an unprecedented rate, though? No, it hasn\u2019t. Look at the new domains chart.\u201cWell, if you were a real engineer, you\u2019d know that most of software development is not writing code.\u201dThat\u2019s only true when you\u2019re in a large corporation. When you\u2019re by yourself, when you\u2019re the stakeholder as well as the developer, you\u2019re not in meetings. You're telling me that people aren\u2019t shipping anything solo anymore? That people aren\u2019t shipping new GitHub projects that scratch a personal itch? How does software creation not involve code?" ], "output": "readability/", "pwd": "/data/archive/1756956198.271156", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2025-09-04T03:23:48.597975+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "screenshot": [], "singlefile": [], "title": [ { "cmd": [ "/usr/bin/curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--proxy", "socks5://tor-socks-proxy:9150", "--max-time", "60", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/128.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/{VERSION} (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/)", "https://substack.com/inbox/post/172538377" ], "cmd_version": "8.10.1", "end_ts": "2025-09-04T03:23:47.920395+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "Where's the Shovelware? 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