Good Stuff 49 - Why Your Kids should Cheat with AI

# The Good Stuff, Episode 49: Why You Should Let Your Kids Cheat With AI*Hosts:* Pete and AndyA friend's question about preparing kids for the AI future kicks off a discussion on credentialing, portfolio careers, and why homework automation might actually be the skill worth developing. Pete and Andy argue that software engineering was never about coding—it was about solving problems and encoding answers so you never have to solve them again. The same applies to your business: agents are expensive inference machines, software is cheap. Someone running pure agent loops will get undercut by someone who encoded it properly. Also: Vietnam as a model for post-institutional economics, the Soviet decay warning, and why the best place to be when the building's on fire is outside.**Key Moments:**- [00:30] Episode 50 milestone coming—"we should probably get on to that"- [01:57] Australia diesel shortage tangent: 28 days of reserves, regional stress- [03:41] Friend asking how to prepare kids for AI future—not from fear, but curiosity- [05:28] Portfolio of tools as the new credential: "Go out and build things, show people, don't tell people"- [06:06] "If you came to me and said you built a bot that does your homework, schedules it, produces it, and you edit it so it doesn't look generated—job pretty good. I would hire that person."- [06:47] Schools banning AI: "It's treated as a bug. It is a feature."- [07:22] "The onus should be on the teacher to come up with a better way of assessing competency"- [08:03] University exams: "Where in real life do we work in isolation with no resources?"- [09:01] Prussian military indoctrination as basis for modern schooling- [10:55] Credentialing built on brand names: "Did you just buy coffee and do photocopying? That's not valuable, but you've got a brand name on the CV."- [12:03] Two reasons credentials disappear: more small companies (less anonymous hiring), and you're working for yourself- [15:43] "If I can define a job well enough to have 10,000 people interview for it, I should probably just go that extra 5% and automate it"- [22:28] **Quote of the episode:** "My experience doesn't match your hot take. So maybe the hot take is wrong."- [27:15] Wingman origin story: laptop open while driving, "I can't even close the laptop because it stops"- [28:14] "If a robot's doing the fucking work, why am I the schmuck sat in a chair?"- [29:49] "The job of software engineers was never coding. It was to understand and solve problems."- [31:56] "You are the software engineer of your business even if you never wrote software"- [34:04] "You could just OpenClaw a company, but it wouldn't be the most efficient way to run it"- [35:11] "Agents are very expensive ways to run software. This is not the end goal."- [36:55] The efficient business: runs on software/hardware, escalates to agents, then to humans- [40:01] Vietnam analogy: "ostensibly communist but the most hyper-capitalist place"- [43:55] Soviet Union warning: status decay, alcoholism, suicide rates- [46:30] "The best place to be is not in the building. We're saying get out, the building's going to be on fire."- [48:00] + Oh no the laptop overheated and things get wierd and we lose some content!!**Quote:** "The goal of encoding stuff is to fix it the same way every time. The engineering bit is solving problems, and the software bit is making sure you never have to solve the problem again. You are the software engineer of your business even if you never wrote software."