# Overview

#overview

Top-level synthesis and navigation for this vault. See [[index]] for the full content catalog.

## Purpose

A high-signal personal knowledge base. `raw/` holds immutable source materials; `wiki/` holds LLM-authored, continuously maintained pages. The current corpus is **webinar-prep material on how AI is reshaping software engineering**, likely authored by [[eugene]] (Status: tentative).

## The through-line

Across nine sources — three talks/videos (two of them Theo's), five interviews, and a business-facing short — one spine recurs:

> **As the cost of writing code goes to zero, value migrates from *producing* software to *directing and verifying* it — and the durable human assets become judgment, ownership, taste, and in-person relationships.**

Everything else hangs off that:

- **The machine side** — how the work gets done now: the [[harness]] (universal agent + small toolset + loop), [[skills-as-memory|skills as the new memory]], the tooling progression [[evolution-of-agent-tooling|tools → MCP → skills]], and [[agentic-loops|inner/outer/meta loops]] — all governed by [[context-as-scarce-resource|context as the scarce resource]]. The non-engineer's version is Allie's [[personal-ai-operating-system]].
- **The human side** — what stays yours: [[product-ownership]] over outcomes, [[connections-as-moat|in-person connections]] as the last non-commoditized asset, [[seniority-and-the-junior-squeeze|judgment as risk-reduction]], and the need to [[decoupling-identity-from-profession|decouple identity from profession]].
- **The strategy side** — where to point it: [[think-wider-not-bigger|think wider not bigger]], treat [[code-as-throwaway|code as throwaway]], and mind [[enterprise-ai-reality|enterprise compliance reality]] (the company-managed-harness market). Theo's second video supplies the *verifying* half of the spine its method: [[make-more-cheap-code]] — keep hand-verification of what ships, and generate orders of magnitude more never-shipped code to verify and explore.
- **The demand side** — three interviews ground it all in a real audience. The two HR ones ([[2026-07-14-nina-interview|Nina]], [[2026-07-14-yulia-interview|Yulia]]) supply pain points (interview write-ups, job descriptions, sourcing) that collapse into "a candidate knowledge base plus search," teachable via [[levels-of-ai-usage]] and [[solve-first-then-skillify]]. Their key finding: **adoption is blocked by friction, not resistance.** The [[2026-07-21-larysa-interview|Larysa interview]] adds the *advanced* user's version of the same story: past the friction, the remaining walls are structural — no durable memory, [[integration-dead-ends|integrations that dead-end]], and drift on loose specs ([[leave-less-room-for-imagination]]). Her diagnosis matters because she is technically deep yet skipped the skills rung, which is exactly what her "the agent forgot" complaint reduces to.

See [[ai-agent-evolution]] for how the capability curve got here.

## Where sources agree vs diverge

- **Agree:** code is cheap/disposable; harnesses are the unit of work; skills-as-memory (Konstantin ↔ Allie ↔ Eugene); human relationships rise in value (Sebastian ↔ Allie ↔ Eugene, who lands there independently in the Yulia interview); solve-first-then-skillify (Eugene ↔ Konstantin's heuristics); context is the constraint. The [[2026-07-22-ai-is-stupid|"AI is stupid!" short]] independently compresses the machine-side spine into a business one-liner: **model + context + harness = employee-level answer**.
- **Diverge:** personal vs company-managed harness ([[eugene]] vs [[sebastian]]); online vs in-person networking (same pair); OSS as marketing vs OSS growth; built-in agent memory as anti-feature (Eugene) vs persistent context docs used without complaint (Allie); tight specs ([[leave-less-room-for-imagination]]) vs wide latitude ([[think-wider-not-bigger]]); agent diff-summaries as sufficient review (Theo/Dax) vs invisible drift as the core danger (Eugene). These live under "Contradictions" on the relevant pages.

## Navigation

- **[[index]]** — content catalog
- **Sources (9):** [[2026-07-14-everything-we-knew-about-software-has-changed|Theo Browne]] · [[2026-07-14-gap-between-ai-users-irreversible|Allie Miller]] · [[2026-07-14-sebastian-eugene-interview|Sebastian interview]] · [[2026-07-14-skills-based-on-git|Konstantin (git skills)]] · [[2026-07-14-nina-interview|Nina interview]] · [[2026-07-14-yulia-interview|Yulia interview]] · [[2026-07-21-larysa-interview|Larysa interview]] · [[2026-07-22-ai-is-stupid|"AI is stupid!" short]] · [[2026-07-24-youre-reading-way-too-much-code|Theo Browne (reading code)]]
- **People:** [[theo-browne]] · [[allie-miller]] · [[sebastian]] · [[eugene]] · [[konstantin]] · [[nina]] · [[yulia]] · [[larysa]]
- **Tools/orgs:** [[claude-code]] · [[hermes]] · [[virtido]] · [[inspectron]]
- **Concepts:** see the through-line above (18 pages) · **Timeline:** [[ai-agent-evolution]]

## Open Questions (vault-level)

- How does an individual build a professional network from a standing start? (Cross-source; the emotional center of the Sebastian interview.) — Tentative protocol drafted at [[network-from-a-standing-start]]; validation instrument at [[2026-07-14-network-from-standing-start]].
- Reusable templates for Allie's 3 foundation docs — a concrete webinar deliverable?
- Should "Ideas for webinar", "HR Contacts", "Webinar Plan" and "Webinar script" be ingested next to connect the corpus to the actual webinar deliverable? (Currently raw-only, per user's ingest scope.)
- Can the transcribe→summarize tool integrate with Manatal (the HR team's ATS)? And is a paid HR-system build going ahead? (Both open from the HR interviews.)
- How should a user pre-empt [[integration-dead-ends|integrations that aren't available for their account]]? Both participants in the Larysa interview left this explicitly unsolved — the corpus's only wholly unanswered *technical* problem.
- Does the skills rung actually fix cross-*session* and cross-*project* memory, or only per-procedure recall? The webinar's central promise rests on this.
