What the next five to ten years ask from anyone trying to stay useful in the AI era.

Originally published on Lei Hua's Substack .

This coda follows the four-question template from references/future_projection.md :

(1) the enduring core → (2) current pressures → (3) 3–5 likely decision points → (4) the questions facing this archetype.

Honest Disclaimer

This section is structured extrapolation from public materials — not prediction. If you re-read this in two years, some of these projections will not have happened — that's expected. The purpose of this book is not to bet on the future, but to give you a lens for watching change.

Treat this as a meditation, not a forecast.

I. The Core We Have Already Established

After chapters one through six, four things can be said with reasonable confidence to be Karpathy's true and stable core — they survived the entire 2022–2026 turbulence unchanged.

Minimalism, readability, the demystification of the training stack.…