A letter from San Francisco, October, 2026
No AI to do our work. No AI to write our docs. No AI to write our code. No AI to write this site, no AI to deploy it to our webhost. No software engineers, we'll have webmasters.
No AI to write our emails. No AI to summarize our meetings. No AI to transcribe our calls. I'm hiring secretaries and notetakers.
We'll mostly email. We'll get people to type memos out on paper and place them on people's desks.
No AI to read your resume. No AI to write LinkedIn posts. Linkedin is banned. No one at the company may have Linkedin. No AI to write sales outreach, or to prep for a call. No AI to write our docs. No AI to read yours.
We'll be slow, we'll make a lot of mistakes - every day will be filled with enormous amounts of repetitive work. Everyone will be excited it's Friday.
What will we do?We'll remember things. We'll sell things, maybe some services, maybe some software. Horrible margins on it all.
We'll be a time capsule. We won't change. New grads will gape at us through the windows.
We'll do waterfall development and promote based on seniority.
We'll be the last clean source on earth for RL training data; won't sell it.
We'll be a museum. We will be funded by the national endowment for the arts.
We'll have eachother's trust that they work we produce is as shitty as we are.
We'll be an acting troupe, I guess. I'm hiring lamplighters and technical writers and icemen.
I'm hiring coachmen and computers.
I'm hiring ivory carvers and link-boys and phrenologists [1].
I'm googling questions about html [2].
Come join me,
Kent Walters