Mastodawn

@ai6yr Quoting from that:

So they adapt to build anti-distillation agent skills, just as the intellectuals adapted after the Anti-Rightist trap.

We are already seeing agent skills built specifically for job security. The performative skill looks comprehensive and demos well but omits the 20% of edge-case knowledge that makes it work in production — you are now more indispensable, not less. The poison pill encodes expertise faithfully but with subtle dependencies on context only you hold — internal wikis you maintain, terminology you coined, data pipelines you own — so removing you causes outputs to drift quietly until someone says “we need to bring them back on this.” The complexity moat makes the skill so architecturally entangled with your other work that extracting your knowledge is harder than keeping you around. You are now a load-bearing wall disguised as a decoration.

I wonder if this is something similar to the last AI boom, the one based on expert systems. I know that the technology had its limitations (but at least it was deterministic and actually included checkable logic) but one major reason that's often given for its failure was the sheer cost of encoding domain-specific knowledge. Maybe an unwritten part of the problem was that experts weren't particularly keen to make themselves redundant?

Anyway, mighty fine points raised there.

The AI Great Leap Forward