The discernment horizon, loop-driven development, and a wizard’s very defensible pond

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (0:04)
So, Andrew, what do you think? Are you going to let Midjourney scan your body?

**Andrew Ziegler** (0:09)
Well, maybe next time that I have to go get an MRI instead of having to lay down inside of a noisy claustrophobic machine, I definitely think it would be a little more like Lux Spa experience to step into a shallow pool of water and then just have a whole bunch of sound beamed at you. I can't believe that's the direction AI is going.

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (0:30)
I know. Actually, when I saw this story, and for those out of the loop on this one, so Midjourney has announced a spa that they want to launch that has these new body scanners that they're inventing that use echolocation like a dolphin does and puts you in a vat of water and can scan you.
When I first read it, I was like, it's not April Fools, is it? I was like, this feels like a joke. But yeah, at the same time, I'm also like, this is exactly where AI needs to be applied. It's like I've been saying for a while now that the models, model advancements really aren't going to be the thing that changes the world anymore. It's going to be like how we actually apply them in the real world. So I don't know. I mean, if they pull it off seems pretty cool.

**Andrew Ziegler** (1:14)
I think it's a fascinating application.

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (1:15)
They're making some pretty bold claims.

**Andrew Ziegler** (1:17)
They are making some bold claims about its accuracy, about its speed, also about its ease of use, and that literally just works by stepping into a shallow pool of water, and then a ring of sensors. They, like a dolphin, like you rightfully called out, they use echolocation to do imaging, and then use that to create the end image. So I guess in a way, it's almost generating an AI image or an output based upon the inputs of those echolocation receptions. And so that's a really fascinating flip of AI on its head.
It also is a really huge step, I think, in medical imaging. We actually, hilariously enough, talked about AI and medical imaging here on Dev Interrupted, I think about a year ago, because medical imaging is actually the realm of medicine that just really rapidly saw a lot of huge AI adoption and high success rates. Because it turns out the AI is just way, way, way better at picking out nuances in MRI images and CAT scans and the like compared to even a really skilled physician. So the idea of applying this to do a real time scan of the body could just make medicine way more accessible for folks. So it's a really exciting application of the technology.

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (2:34)
Maybe a Midjourney spa coming to your town sometime soon. We'll see. We'll see. But in the meantime, welcome to the Friday Deploy brought to you by LinearB. I'm your host, Ben Lloyd-Pearson.

**Andrew Ziegler** (2:48)
And I'm your host, Andrew Ziegler.

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (2:50)
And today we are covering, well, the best models soon be out of reach. Loop-driven development, the flawed search for a universal language and some wizard in their pond. But we'll get to that one. But first, I want to talk about AI models becoming out of reach in this new article from friend of show Steve Yegge, titled The Flat Curve Society. So Andrew, what do we have here?

**Andrew Ziegler** (3:13)
Okay. So this is the latest missive from Steve Yegge, who you know we've been following nearly religiously here at Dev Interrupted about how agentic engineering has been transformed. He's the man who brought us Gastown and started to introduce us all to the idea of autonomous coding factories at the top of the year. So his opinion is definitely one to watch and don't worry, we're watching it for you and here's the latest of what he's saying. He's talking about the Flat Curve Society, and this speaks to the idea of what is the end result of once everyone gets into a Gastown way of working and we enter a Gastown type of connected world. It's what Yegge and his followers, the other folks building and using Gastown and Gast City have been building towards. But along the way, we have to prepare for a huge, huge change in the users that are entering this space. This is what he calls the world of mediocre users and mediocre outputs and how to protect against them. But more importantly, we also enter this realm where everything gets optimized so efficiently and domain expertise becomes truly the last island that you stand on, that even that starts to evaporate from underneath you. He calls this the discernment horizon. It's a scary idea in which the idea is that the machine and the process you've built is so efficient, and the work starts to climb so far above a realm of understanding that you're able to keep in your head, and then you lose your ability to efficiently grade the outputs. The ceiling on these systems, it turns out, is human-based, not the velocity of a gas town churning underneath. It's a lot closer to where we are now than I think folks are giving a credit for, and that's what Yegge calls out in this article.