Import AI 438: Silent sirens, flashing for us all

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Silent Sirens, Flashing For Us All

A funny thing has happened to me recently - I’ve stopped spending every hour of every day thinking about or working on AI. Somewhere between the midnight feeds of my newborn, preventing my toddler from hurling themselves off of the high surfaces they’ve started being able to reach (or expertly, as if gifted with a kind of radar, finding the sharpest thing in the house or on the street and running directly at it), and preparing large amounts of nutritious food for my newly expanded family, I’ve found myself without the time necessary to be staring directly into the alien portal etched in silicon from whence the changes in the world are being summoned.

I won’t lie, it’s been oddly relaxing.

But it has also caused me to reflect on what is happening with AI and how naturally illegible it is. I walk around the town in which I live and there aren’t drones in the sky or self-driving cars or sidewalk robots or anything like that. And when I spend time on the internet, aimlessly scrolling social media sites in the dead of night as I attempt to extract a burp from my newborn, I might occasionally see some synthetic images or video, but mostly I see what has always been on these feeds: pictures of people I do and don’t know, memes, and a mixture of news and jokes.

And yet you and I both know there are great changes afoot. Huge new beasts lumbering from some unknown future into our present, dragging with them change.

I saw one of these beasts recently - during a recent moment when the time stars aligned (my wife, toddler, and baby were all asleep at the same time!) I fired up Claude Code with Opus 4.5 and got it to build a predator-prey species simulation with an inbuilt procedural world generator and nice features like A* search for pathfinding - and it one-shot it, producing in about 5 minutes something which I know took me several weeks to build a decade ago when I was teaching myself some basic programming, and which I think would take most seasoned hobbyists several hours. And it ...