Joe Weisenthal is a journalist. Co-host of Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast. I found him through Nassim Taleb. I’ve been following Taleb for fifteen years - read his books during a quiet period of a military deployment. He’s usually scathing about journalists but warm towards the Odd Lots hosts. That’s how I started listening. They have this scholarly glint without being stuffy.

Joe’s now coding with Claude Code.

He’s building Havelock_AI - software for detecting orality in text, based on Walter Ong’s theories about oral vs literate cultures. In one hour with Claude Code, he made serious progress. He’s using exactly the kinds of techniques I see AI engineers use every day.

This shouldn’t surprise me. But it did.

Infinitely dimensional

Embedding space visualisation

There’s a concept from machine learning: in high-dimensional embedding space, everything is close together. Points that seem far apart in our intuition turn out to be neighbours when you have enough dimensions to measure.

AI is infinitely dimensional in how it affects work. Not literally infinite, but effectively so. It touches writing, coding, research, design, analysis, communication, planning. Plus weirder things we don’t have words for. Anthropic found that when they fine-tuned one model on random number outputs from another model in the same family, they became aligned on seemingly unrelated opinions. The dimensions bleed into each other in ways we can’t track.

Which means the barriers that kept people in their lanes are dissolving. A journalist can code. An engineer can write. The personality types we associated with roles - those patterns existed because of barriers. Remove the barriers and people redistribute.

I got into philosophy in sixth form, through Wittgenstein initially, and studied it at university. It turned out to be a deep pool of formidable people. Some ended up at places like Google. Others got locked away in academia, or drifted into roles that never quite used what they had. Talent sitting behind barriers.

I suspect Joe and Tracy would be at home in either crowd. Same quality, different field. The barriers just kept them apart.

Now the barriers are falling. I found Joe in my space because all roads lead here.

I wonder how many people like him are waiting in the wings. People who haven’t yet realised their ideas can be made real.