something_else

Dude this is so passive aggressive I should clarify, I didn’t mean all of those were examples of bragging or ego. I could have been clearer on that. It was just every example ChatGPT could find of people self-identifying as tier 2. Some, including yours, are pretty reasonable. A lot are clearly just people pumping up their own tyres.

It's simply an effect noted in some people, and I notice the effect in myself. It doesn't necessarily apply to everyone, you may be different. I don't have that much interest in wildly ambitious goals, although I can see the value in them. They just don't work particularly well for me personally as a motivational tool. Small, achievable process-focused goals tend to work better for me. By process-focused goals I mean setting goals for consistency rather than outcome. For example if I want to get good at a particular skill, say a sport, gym, dating, programming etc. I set a goal like "I will go out 2 nights per week and initiate conversations with 5 people" instead of "I will be dating a model by the end of the year". Again, everybody is different. For some people the latter works better. One of the books on Leo's book list called Mastery covers my thoughts on this quite well. One of its central points is that mastery in a domain comes largely from consistency and learning to enjoy the process rather than constantly focusing on results.

I'm less convinced of this. Our team has been using AI agents for around 6-8 months now and they are amazing, but still a long way away from being able to do the entire job without human input. And it's not like what we are working on is cutting edge, it's full stack web development. Most likely there will be less jobs in software engineering because 1 developer can now do the work of 2-3. However that doesn't mean software engineering is going away. It's just changing.

I often find telling people about my goals makes me less inclined to follow through. When I noticed this I researched it and there is actually a relatively well-understood mechanism behind it. It's called the Gollwitzer Substitution Effect. The general idea is that telling people about your goals can make the desired identity feel partly achieved before you've actually earned it. That social recognition gives you some of the psychological reward of already being that person, which can reduce your motivation to do the work required to become them. As a general rule I now rarely tell people about my bigger goals, especially close friends and family where this effect is particularly powerful. I like keeping the motivation bottled up inside, not letting it out until I have actually achieved something.

I listed out about 20 examples I found on the previous page if you're curious. It actually happens even more than I expected it to.

I'm actually loving my job more than I ever have. Though I did have that feeling ffor a period of time, as did my coworkers. I'm lucky though the company I work for is small and listened to the dev team when we were complaining that the current system wasn't working. We've now restructured very fast to get the most out of AI tools. This restructure has actually made me enjoy my job a LOT more. Here is a brief summary of the restructure. Before Team of 8 devs, 2 product managers, 1 designer Split into two squads of 4 devs Each time works on a big project which takes 1 to 3 months to complete Architecture of the solution is planned by the tech lead Tickets are written by the tech lead for each dev Devs pick up the tickets and implement Design and product team work very separately from everyone else, almost exclusively with the tech lead After Team of 8 devs, 2 product managers, 1 designer Each dev works on a their own 1 to 3 month project, assigned to them based on preference and skill They form a 'Pod' with our designer, one of the product managers and a tech lead (designers, product and tech lead are distributed across multiple pods) The dev plans the architecture themselves They write their own tickets The dev ultimately has complete ownership of that project end-to-end Summary This works incredibly well with AI coding agents. The previous setup is more traditional agile, and with AI coding agents it was a nightmare. Everybody in a squad is producing a lot of code for the same projects, so everybody is stepping on each other's toes. At the same time, you end up feeling like a meat interface for the AI agent because you are just told what tickets to pick up, then you put them into Claude, review the results, then iterate on it to a solution. There is little architectural thought involved as the tech lead tended to handle that part early on. In the new setup I get to pick my own projects, plan out complex architectural solutions to them myself, break it down into a plan, break that down into tickets, implement each ticket, and work closely with product and designers the whole way along. In the end I have a single project which I feel completely responsible for and I love it.

It seriously developed me as a person. If you neglect your social life you’ll probably be miserable. If you neglect sex and dating you’ll probably be miserable too. There are ways to do these things more consciously without completely rejecting them

Our team used Claude (Fable and Opus) until around 2 months ago, then we switched to ChatGPT / Codex. Oh my god, they're so much better to work with. I thought I was going insane using Claude because it talks in such weird, long prose that makes very little sense. It's INFURIATING. I hear they've fixed it in the newer models, but frankly Astra/Sol are faster and arguably better for coding. And I still think their way of writing is more human.

Here are like 20 for you

Agree entirely, this matches my experience. I think if you're already in the field and competent, AI boosts your productivity 2-3x. It's getting much harder to break into the field though.

I think there are existing solutions for this, do you use any CRM software already? Or AI outreach solutions? These tools exist. Throwing AI alone at the spreadsheets here is probably sub-optimal. And vibe-coding a cutting edge CRM with zero technical experience is... extremely optimistic. Sorry. I think it can work if you found a business niche you know well, for me software engineering, though it has a couple of major risks. As AI models get better, you'll be able to drop them into an organisation and they'll figure out how to collect the context they need themselves. Big tech companies are making it easier and easier to connect agents to different bits of software through protocols like MCP. Even now, a small / medium company using Microsoft services can just pay for a business Copilot subscription, download the salesforce connector and they're good to go. The model can instantly search all Microsoft services and your CRM for context. For most businesses this is more than enough and it's not really something you could reliably charge for I don't think. In some fields like software engineering it's a bit more complex because we are typically pushing these AI models to their limits. Our team has a full suite of Codex skills to make the AI conform to our coding standards, but I suspect there are less organised dev teams out there who keep putting this off. So there is definitely space for context-engineering in this field, and I assume other technical fields like Mathematics. But these are fields where you need deep domain knowledge to produce effective skills. So it isn't really a great way to grift a quick buck.

I have a lot to share on this from a software engineering perspective

I think you could definitely sell that premise. A custom or retrained model you can realistically create is unlikely to be competitive with frontier models for most tasks though. Retraining or fine-tuning is somewhat old news now for most use cases. You'd likely be better off running a context-engineering agency that configures the frontier models for companies through skills, plugins, custom agent loops, CLAUDE/AGENT.md files and other forms of external memory and context. Getting this setup right massively improves their performance on tasks for a business which can provide a lot of value. AI is all about getting the right context into the model just now. On your more general point, I don't know how this protects you against the risks of post-scarcity AI-driven world. We're talking about a world where there are basically two classes of people, those with control over the means to produce value and those without. Being able to build custom models or tweak them does not put you in the former unless you earn so much money that you are competitive with the likes of the massive AI companies who actually control the most capable models. Oh, right, yea on this point I agree. My point was not that everybody has equal value in the marketplace just now, my point is that everybody basically would in a post-scarcity AI-driven world. "bringing it into the real world" > "proposes highly unrealistic theoretical scenario" I'm only talking about a theoretical post-scarcity AI-driven world so much because that was the original topic of discussion. I have been trying to keep this discussion anchored to that original point. You said it was just my gut feeling that such a world is more likely to be dystopian than utopian, I think I have provided a fairly solid argument that it is very possible it will be, and that it is not just a gut feeling. I'm interpreting everybody 'owning AI equally' to mean everyone has access to a frontier model that they have full control over with no guardrails, which cannot be taken away from them. If that's not what you meant then please correct me. But assuming it is, who knows if that would be a good thing. It's just your gut feeling that it would be good. You would then have dictators all over the world who now potentially have the capability to produce an extremely effective bio weapon, or to hack into nuclear launch sites and reactors of other countries. To assume that such a chaotic and rapid transformation of the world would be positive is, I think, quite unwise.

Diagnosing someone's developmental stages can also be quite cringe. It comes across as patronising. Because SD is hierarchal, when you are 'diagnosing' someone with Stage Green blindspots the implication is that you are more developed than them as a person, even if that's not the intention. Obviously that annoys people. If the goal is to help them develop, that's likely a bad strategy. It's better to just point out the flaws in reasoning without actually labelling them as 'Stage green blindspots'. One of the capacities associated with Yellow is being able to understand people operating from different value systems and communicate in a way that makes sense within their frame. That means showing someone the limitations of their thinking without constantly pointing out, or implying, that they’re lower down the spiral than you. If we are talking about the stages theoretically and discretely I think this is valid. But their expressions in practice are never discrete, people exist on a continuous spectrum across the spiral. There's a reason the term used to describe someone's level of development is "centre of gravity is around stage green" rather than someone "is stage green". People may have aspects of stage yellow in their development even if their centre of gravity is around green. If you are operating from the perspective of "I am yellow and they are green, therefore I am more developed across all domains of life than them" then you are using the model wrong. Check out the document below, it has shit formatting but I can't find the better version. Cowan specifically warns about people identifying too strongly with Tier 2, and argues that the need to proclaim yourself as Tier 2 can itself display traits that are at odds with what Tier 2 is supposed to represent. He also warns about it becoming a status symbol, and about using the model to look down on people as less developed because they aren’t on the same “Tier 2” plane as you. https://spiraldynamics-integral.de/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Cowan-Christopher-First-and-Second-Tier.pdf I agree that you rarely see people posting on a quest to develop a deep understanding of systems here, but that's hardly surprising. You're ultimately just very unlikely to develop that kind of understanding from a forum debate, and this place is rife with high-level shit-posting and intellectual sparring to boost one's own ego. I'm far from immune to that, in fact I enjoy it. Aside from that the forum is also really good for giving and receiving more practical advice. But the higher level stuff just isn't something that can be absorbed very well in this format because it doesn't capture attention well enough to keep the thread popular, so people stop posting that kind of content. I don't really agree with this. I see plenty of people making interesting points across the spiral here. I feel like this demonstrates the issue with building an identity around tier 2. Rather than acknowledge that someone from any level of development may have interesting ideas, you are flattening them all down into caricatures of their development stage.

Cringe is largely about delivery and context, rather than content. If a software engineer said “I studied systems architecture at university, and here is the specific principle I think you’re overlooking” I wouldn’t find that cringe. They’re giving a reason and explaining why their background is relevant. If instead they said “I studied systems architecture, so you’re wrong and simply lack the experience I have” that has a much higher potential to be cringe because the credential is being used as a substitute for explaining the disagreement. That latter is much closer to how Spiral Dynamics stages get used on this forum. There is also another important difference between the two cases. “software engineer” is relatively bounded, competence in that field can be verified quite easily. Whereas “I’m Yellow” is often a self-assigned assessment of one’s own developmental level for which there is little evidence on a forum. So using “I’m Yellow” as evidence that your interpretation is more correct than someone you deem as "Green" will often not land well unless you can really back it up to the point where people believe you are at that level. I think this point misses what the Spiral Dynamics hierarchy is supposed to represent. The point isn’t that Yellow is simply “more correct” than Green, Blue, Red, etc. Each stage embodies ways of thinking that are adaptive to particular conditions and problems. Sometimes a Green lens may be the most appropriate one, sometimes Blue, Red, Orange, and so on. So “I’m Yellow, therefore I understand this better than someone at Green” doesn’t follow the system. Someone whose centre of gravity is Green could have a much better understanding of a particular domain than someone who considers themselves Yellow. Developmental stage is not a substitute for domain knowledge, experience, or the quality of the actual argument. In fact, if Yellow is supposed to recognise the functional value of the earlier stages, then automatically dismissing a Green perspective because it is Green seems contrary to the very thing Yellow is supposed to understand. Yellow is not meant to be a label to boost someone's ego and assert dominance, authority, or correctness. So when it is used that way it often comes across as cringe.