Two years after
It's been two years since the infamous situational awareness. I completely agree with what Leopold said, "You can see the future first in San Francisco,". I wanted to find out where humanity is going in the next 20 years and I can't think of any other places to look for it other than San Francisco. Important enough that I paused whatever idea I was working on to stop the humming noise in my ear and flew in to San Francisco from London.
The first ultraintelligent machine is arriving. If you are in San Francisco you can probably feel it, even engineers who used to work on low-level engineering tasks no longer need to write code. Two years ago my friends and I would complain that it (coding agents) couldn't handle low-level networking tasks. As far as today goes, there are still small edges you need to drive it towards, but for the most part it can competently do the majority of the infrastructure work as long as the specs are clear, and handle small parts of eigendecomposition, convex optimisation, change detection and more in pure math.
We forgot the order of magnitudes (here and after OOM). We only saw what's now but forgot to relate now to the past and the speed it has been, the order of magnitude. What was soon going to happen was kept among several hundred people, most of them in San Francisco. Two years after, the world has realised what's going on, roughly, but it's still within a small subset of people. Not hundreds, but tens of thousands of engineers and people who work closely with the frontiers and help enterprises transform their businesses. The large majority is enjoying, or suffering from, the "AI boom", but this is not the end of the story.
I witnessed a lot of my friends treating every new generation of large release like a pet - "Why is it not responding to me?", "How can I make it work smarter?", "They cancelled the release? I am down today. I don't want to code." An invisible emotional bond with a junior employee who you have trained for the past couple of years. Once a good model gets retracted, they comment, "There was nothing like it. I don't want to use anything else now."
If the doomsday machine is meant to be made, we will need every power we have on this planet to survive our own curiosity. Perhaps Elon's SpaceX can help a very small group of us to sustain our lifeelsewhere.
I will reference a lot from Leopold's situational awareness (appreciation and gratitude to him who wrote it), combined with what I have heard and read, to fact-check what has changed. This is an article I read again and again, wish I have read, and anyone of my friends in London have read in 2024.
Let's see where we are at after two years.
Lois, June 2026
Outline
About me
I am Lois. I am a bundler engineer primarily work on infrastructure projects, orchestration and deployment. There are not many of us on this planet (probably 300-400 of us?). Previously I was founding engineer in Toma (backed by YC and a16z) on voice AI orchestration infra, runtime over the air update for mobile, tooling support for open source projects like Bun, Rspack (by ByteDance web infra) and the Gotenberg Project. Funny enough I was also Knight Frank's No.6 employee for their Capital Market Team (commercial transaction Toshiba, DJI, Huawei and more) in South China in my past life. Bootstrapped a bunch of business from China, Macau and the UK including smart city consultancy (800k+ ARR before I left China), internet routers and more.
Talks
- "Database: MySQL and Postgres' indexing engine, query planner, metadata", McKinsey London HQ, 2023
- "The superhuman at Supabase" - Conversation with Supabase CEO, Paul Copplestone, 2024
- Unfuck your bundlers in NX" Speech in NX Summit - Monorepo World 2024
- "Fixing your bundlers" speech in City JS Athens, Greece 2024
- "Building runtime over-the-air update for React Native" speech in RenderATL, Atlanta, USA, 2025
- "Detangle the mess of NHS" talking about document processing pipeline in Zoopla HQ, London 2026
- Finalist speaker - React Summit, NYC, USA, 2025