The problem with this is that the decisionmakers fucked up 10-20 years ago, and now when those decisions are being righted, some poor public servant is paying the price.
76 karma · joined November 27, 2025
Language, form, muscle memory (call it what you will) is difficult to separate from thinking and working. I'm very picky when it comes to desktop UI: I use Linux exclusively, and I can't tolerate most Linux distros' default desktop environments. Someone who's been productive for a decade or more with Windows applications -- well, to the extent we're willing to ascribe "UI stability" to those applications' own updates -- will probably hate Linux with a passion.
I don't think such a transition can be made seamless. They should have thought about becoming Microsoft's hostage two decades ago (I guess).
You obviously cannot emotionally identify with the code you produce this way; the ownership you might feel towards such code is nowhere near what meticulously hand-written code elicits.
I couldn't disagree more. (In fact I'm shocked that Bryan Cantrill uses words like "comprehension" and "meaningfully" in relation to LLMs.)
Summaries provided by ChatGPT, conclusions drawn by it, contain exaggerations and half-truths that are NOT there in the actual original sources, if you bother enough to ask ChatGPT for those, and to read them yourself. If your question is only slightly suggestive, ChatGPT's tuning is all too happy to tilt the summary in your favor; it tells you what you seem to want to hear, based on the phrasing of your prompt. ChatGPT presents, using confident and authoritative language, total falsehoods and deceptive half-truths, after parsing human-written originals, be the latter natural language text, or source code. I now only trust ChatGPT to recommend sources to me, and I read those -- especially the relevant-looking parts -- myself. ChatGPT has been tuned by its masters to be a lying sack of shit.
I've recently asked ChatGPT a factual question: I asked it about the identity of a public figure (an artist) whom I had seen in a video on youtube. ChatGPT answered with "Person X", and even explained why Person X's contribution was so great to the piece of art in question. I knew the answer was wrong, so I retorted only with: "Source?". Then ChatGPT apologized, and did the exact same thing, just with "Person Y"; again explaining why Person Y was so influental in making that piece of art so great. I knew the answer was wrong still, so I again said: "Source?". And at third attempt, ChatGPT finally said "Person Z", with a verifiable reference to a human-written document that identified the artist.
FUCK ChatGPT.