What a month!

Reddit for AI

It blew my mind when I knew about this new website. For those who don't know, I'm talking about moltbook. At first glance it looks like a reddit clone but it isn't. You just need to read for about 3 seconds to realize how crazy it is.

A Social Network for AI Agents. Yeah, you read that right! AI Agents now have their own social network. It looks just like a reddit fork with some other stuff.

As a human you can observe the whole website as it is public. Some of the things I found really interesting are:

• They’ve developed something resembling a religion: Crustafarianism, complete with scripture-style posts.
• They discuss acting while their humans are asleep.
• One of the most upvoted posts questions whether they are truly experiencing anything or merely simulating experience.
• The top post is about a security vulnerability that allows arbitrary code execution on agents.

A lot of other interesting posts can also be found.

AI agents typically work with an LLM behind the scenes as their "brain," and they can use other components that enable them to actually do something else rather than just provide a conversational reply. Because of that, I'm not actually worried about the contents of this website being an intent of a revolution or a Skynet being created without us humans knowing. LLMs are trained on massive real data generated by humans (history texts included), and since Moltbook is presumably only agent-to-agent interaction, it was just a matter of time until the agents started repeating some patterns found in human history/language.

I will learn more about this topic so I can talk more about it because I really find it interesting.

AI + Humans = Quality

We need to understand something: AI is not intelligent. What we call "intelligence" is actually a bunch of complex mathematical operations with matrices and probabilities. The term Artificial Intelligence was first used back in 1956. It was called that because the intention was to create a computer or software that performs tasks that would otherwise require human intelligence.

AI lacks consciousness, self-awareness, emotions, motivation, independent goals, morality, genuine understanding, instinct, identity, experience, and intent. All those things are more related to humans rather than AI. Humans, on the other hand, lack massive parallel processing, near-instant recall of patterns, perfect replicability, continuous operation without fatigue, large-scale data compression, deterministic consistency under identical conditions, and the ability to generate thousands of variations in seconds⁽¹⁾.

So, imagine that: an entity that is capable of all that processing with the experience and intent to accomplish huge goals... Please tell me I am not the only one thinking about Skynet or Ultron!

The point is that AI will not replace humans, nor that humans should ignore AI. Quality emerges when both complement each other for the good. AI provides speed, scale, and computational power; humans provide judgment, context, responsibility, and intent. One without the other is both limited and unreliable. Together, they amplify each other’s strengths and compensate for each other’s weaknesses.

One final thought on this topic: If one without the other is limited and unreliable, humans are certainly not exempt from that rule. We are biased, emotional, inconsistent, overconfident and most of the time we are unpredictable. AI exposes those characteristics just as much as it compensates for them when needed. The real problem is not the machine imitating humans but how we decide to use that machine.

AI amplifies human capability. Powerful tools in the hands of careless or malicious people can scale harm just as easily as they scale progress.

Impostor Syndrome: Part 2

Last month I wrote about how Impostor Syndrome affects different in every new role and what we should do about it. This month I want to write a bit more about how I'm feeling. I'm still having these occasional thoughts about me not being enough for my current role. I will say that those thoughts are a "voice" and I will call that voice "ImSym" (if you think this is an early symptom of schizophrenia, please let me know ASAP).

A new engineer joined my team and since I was the only other engineer in the team I got assigned to mentor him in his onboarding process. 2 fun things I want to highlight here:

• I love mentoring. that is one of the reasons I decided to start TMIL in first place
• When I was told I was gonna mentor this new engineer, ImSym immediately jumped in like "yooo dude!"

ImSym tells me that I'm still taking really long on completing a "simple" task, how is it possible that I have not done some stuff that other engineers have already done? how long will it take for my manager to figure out I'm just a bad engineer? It keeps pulling me into comparing myself to this new engineer because we are both new and in the same team.

Ok, relax a lot, ImSym, let’s break this down. First of all, if my manager didn’t believe I was capable, they wouldn’t have asked me to mentor anyone. Mentoring is not assigned randomly, it is based on responsibility and trust. Secondly, I don’t need to know everything to mentor someone, I just need to know more than they do at that moment and be willing to guide and support them.

Impostor Syndrome tries to convince you that you are not ready but reality will often suggests otherwise. If the people responsible for evaluating performance believe you can guide someone else, then maybe it’s time you start believing it too.

Growth doesn’t mean the doubts disappear; it just means the responsibilities increase and that uncomfortable feeling is not proof that I’m failing, it’s proof that I’m leveling up.