CodeMage

First, let me make one thing clear: my comment was in no way meant to be a substitute for reading the post. I was not writing some kind of a review for people to decide whether they should read the post, or presenting a summary. I was commenting on what I disliked about it and everyone should read the post to form their own opinions.

That said, I disagree with you about the context. Yes, what you quoted is the immediate context, but I think the bigger context -- the one I described in the rest of my comment -- is the more important one.

Managers are welcome to try to integrate IC activities into their job. In fact, I wish more of them did it, so I didn't have to deal with managers who equate coding to "typing" and can't wait for the AI to replace those of us who have spent years honing that particular skill.

But the IC work should not come at the cost of doing what the manager is supposed to do in the first place: provide a higher level of integration and problem solving for their ICs. By "higher", I mean in the hierarchical sense. A manager is higher on the ladder than I am, and that means they should be able to see a wider perspective and help me integrate it into my work. And their manager should do that for them, so that they can pass it on to me, etc.

The author doesn't want to be a "paper-shuffler"? Guess what, that's one of the most important aspects of their job and, incidentally, one of the reasons why I didn't pick management as my career.

I can relate to the feeling of frustration one occasionally gets when a core aspect of one's job becomes unpleasant, but that's no excuse for straw man arguments.

From the post: "The middle manager that doesn't perform any useful work is a fun stereotype, but I also think it's a good target to aim for."

This is the kind of argument that makes people come up with middle manager stereotypes in the first place. In fact, the whole post is a great example of why middle manager stereotypes exist: it starts with a straw man argument and comes up with a "better alternative" that makes life easier for the manager, regardless of what the manager's reports really need.

I've seen this whole "I will empower you to do everything on your own" principle in action and it's exhausting. Especially when the word "empower" is a used as a euphemism for "have you take on additional responsibilities".

Look, boss, sometimes empowering me is just what I need, but sometimes I need you to solve a specific problem for me, so I can keep solving all the other problems I already have on my plate.

Do arguments even matter when the article is clearly clickbait? If the title is not enough to identify it as clickbait, the first 4 paragraphs make it clear, with the whole "imprinting" bit.

My first programming language was BASIC. My second programming language was assembly (for Z80A, then for 6502, later for x86). My third programming language, the one the author would call "formative" was Pascal.

None of these languages left me "imprinted" to the point of forever shaping my tastes and making me unable to adapt to or appreciate newer languages.

In fact, if we're talking about formative experiences, I remember one professor at the university who said, quite seriously, that "Anyone who has programmed in BASIC has been damaged for life and will never be a good programmer." The reason why that was a formative experience is that it taught me that people in which we put our trust can be assholes who ruin people's lives because they think some bit of dogmatic bullshit they came up with is clever.

And that's really what the article is about: the author wants to show off how clever they are. I'm okay with that, in general. I remember reading Steve Yegge's blog posts and finding them entertaining, regardless of whether I agreed with them. Thing is, Yegge had a lot more to say than just "look at how clever I am".

Now it does. It didn't when the original comment was made.

The vast majority of users want their apps to work. They don't care whether that happens through automatic updates or not.

It's the developers who don't want the headache of not having automatic updates.

Would you say cocaine makes those people happy?

Yes. Most gas stations in the US are self-serve, with screens and buttons next to them. Some are even switching to touch screens. And now some of those screens display ads while you're fueling your car. Hell, some even have sound and it's set at a rather obnoxious volume.

> You went to university [...]

> by your decision you computed that this decision was worth it

> The only thing that you need to complain about

> you did a wrong calculation

Is that a general "you" or are you replying directly to me? Because if it's the latter, you need to read what I wrote more carefully.

I'm one of those immigrants I wrote about. My education, back where I was born and grew up, was both free and top-notch.

The point of my reply was to explain why "if we eliminated all H1B workers, Americans in the IT industry would be at full employment" is a disturbingly naive idea.

Speaking of disturbing oversimplifications:

> The only thing that you need to complain about is yourself that you did a wrong calculation for such a life-influencing decision of going to college.

If you think that life is as simple as that, you either haven't lived very long or were privileged enough to live in a bubble where things are so cut-and-dried black-and-white.

> And don’t try to convince me that a Java developer from India possesses skills that our university graduates don’t.

Skills? Not necessarily, but there's something a lot of immigrants possess that your university graduates don't: freedom from the weight of student loans.

I'm not from India, so I can't speak for them. Plus, I imagine that the situation in India changed over the years and it's probably not the same as when this trend started. But I can speak for myself and people I know from many other countries, including China. Most of us have had an education that is on par with a lot of American colleges and universities, but without the crushing cost.

Get rid of all immigrant workers and the industry will collapse, because your graduates need to pay off a huge debt that immigrants don't have.

This fails to address the question you replied to. When "our code" is memory-safe and "their code" isn't, it's still "Our Product™" that ends up with a CVE that costs us money and reputation, because users don't care about whose code it was.

> Keep in mind the goal is to teach someone who has zero ideas about datastructures what they are, not to give some analogies to an experienced software engineer.

I agree, which is exactly the problem I have with your objections. If you're teaching data structures to a kid with zero knowledge, you do it gradually, rather than trying to turn them into an experienced software engineer right from the start.

Start with an oversimplification and then build on top of that. The point of an introductory example is to focus on a single concept or a single aspect, and communicate it in a way that is intuitive to someone with no knowledge of it, without overwhelming them or distracting them with additional details. Then, once they've grokked it, challenge them to find flaws in the oversimplification and use that to teach the next concept.

> Ask a kid to draw you a mock recipe, you won't just get a list of steps in return.

Depends on the age. When they're young enough and haven't actually done any serious cooking, kids tend to think that recipes are a series of steps.

Hell, a lot of adults I know, when I ask them something like "how do you make X", start by explaining the steps instead of laying out all the ingredients and their quantities.

This is exactly what I'm talking about when I refer to overwhelming or distracting your students with additional details. You're not trying to build a cookbook app, you're trying to teach someone about a specific data structure.

> Ingredients have quantities attached. If I tell you to make a cake you need sugar, an egg and flour and give you all the steps but no quantities, you're not making a cake. A map is the obvious choice for storing ingredients.

If you're trying to teach sets and your domain of choice is cooking, it makes sense to start with a "list of unique ingredients". You're focusing on uniqueness as a property of sets. Then, once you've explained sets, you can point out that a list of ingredients without quantities isn't very useful, which gives you a great way to introduce maps.

As a bonus, if you've already taught your students about tuples, you can then compare a set of tuples and a map, drawing parallels and pointing out important differences.

> At best it would be somewhat understandable if it said a map can be used for a cookbook, with dish names mapping to recipes, but even this would be a stretch and assume a dish can be made in a single way.

Again, you're thinking like an experienced software engineer. Yes, you can totally assume a dish can be made in a single way if you're teaching kids.

If I'm introducing "string" as a concept for the first time, I won't immediately start explaining the difference between a byte, a Unicode code point, and a glyph.

My bad, I didn't realize :)

I don't see any part of my comment where I blamed the kids. I explicitly said that it's a flaw in the way our society approaches education.

That was pretty much my point. Most kids won't use trig in real life, so making trig more interesting is only half of what we need to do. The other half is making kids more interested in learning.

Okay, maybe I'm dumb, but I don't get how the first 3 are "simply plain wrong". They're open-ended enough that I have no trouble imagining how you could use those 3 data structures for those 3 purposes, so I must be missing some aspect of what you're trying to say.

"When do I ever need to use trig in real life" is an interesting question, because it points out certain flaws in the way our society approaches education. One of those flaws is the one you pointed out: the examples we use are not very interesting.

But there's another flaw that gets overlooked most of the time, which is that we're raising kids to believe that "why are you teaching me something that you're not 100% sure I will need in my day-to-day life" is a sensible question, when it really isn't.

Outside of my 2-year stint in the game development industry, I never really needed most of what I learned about trigonometry in my day-to-day life. But that doesn't mean it wasn't useful.

Yes, we should make the subject matter more approachable to kids, but we should also try to shift the paradigm so that kids are more open to learning new things.

Dependency management should most definitely be one of the main criteria for evaluating how good a build system is. What's misguided is intentionally opting for worse dependency management in an attempt to solve a people problem, i.e. being careless about adding dependencies to your project in circumstances when you should be careful.

Is it a reference? It doesn't look like something anyone would consistently be reaching for. It looks more like a fun visualization of some core concepts, something you would show people as a cool thing you made.

Even if it was a reference, the same criticism about left-right scrolling would still apply, at least if you're using the combination of resolution and DPI that people like me do. In fact, if it's meant to be a reference, then it's even more important to make it ergonomic.

I occasionally read about programming when I'm not programming. Some of that reading happens on my phone.

No, it's not. The key concept here is the reduction of coverage.

The opening part of the post makes certain claims -- "catch bugs before they ship" and "keep our master branch always clean" -- that can only be true if the coverage is not reduced. But, as other replies point out, if the heuristic for test selection has false negatives, the coverage is effectively reduced, which can result in bugs.

That problem can be bad enough when the heuristic is deterministic. AI throws determinism out of the window, which only exacerbates the problem.

When you press Enter in the search box, Firefox finds the next occurrence of your search pattern. An easy fix that doesn't require an extension is to press Esc first, which closes the search box, and then you can press Enter.

It's coding, it just isn't professional software engineering.

The first non-toy program I ever wrote was in BASIC, on ZX Spectrum 48, and although I don't have it anymore, I remember it was one of the shittiest, most atrocious examples of spaghetti code that I've ever seen in my life.

Everyone starts somewhere.

Bingo! Not to mention that "dealing with juniors" is one of the critical ways for a senior engineer to grow.

> All of my senior, staff, principals love it because we can make something faster than having to deal with a junior because it’s trivial to write the spec/requirement for Claude etc…

How will you make new senior, staff, and principal engineers without "having to deal with a junior"?

That's interesting and sounds like a hole in my knowledge of history. I'm curious, were those monarchies actually dictatorships? The UK still has a monarch, but it's not a dictatorship.

> We (Eastern Europeans) could not do neither of those things without risking jail time and we still managed to topple dictatorships.

As someone who was born and grew up in post-Communist Yugoslavia, there are a few things I can offer as an observation here. Please don't take these as a disagreement or a criticism. It's just additional context I would like to offer to everyone who happens to read this.

One is that people are perfectly fine with a dictatorship as long as the life is good enough for the majority. That's why no one toppled Tito, but they got rid of Milošević in the end, after all the wars, sanctions, and bombings.

Another is that all those things that you said Americans can do without risking jail time aren't the things that toppled dictatorships. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they're worthless. On the contrary, things like talking to your neighbor, protesting, and sparking dialogues are all indispensable ingredients for overthrowing a dictator, but they're not the endgame. They're just the stepping stones.

Which brings me to my final observation: the only way to overthrow a dictatorship is through a revolution. It doesn't have to be a violent revolution, but it does have to be a revolution and not just a bunch of limited, scattered, uncoordinated protests.

Whether Trump's administration is a dictatorship or not is not something I'm interested in discussing on HN, but the fact remains that the sentiment GP expressed -- that they're "resigned to the fact that there's nothing we as individuals can do about it" -- indicates that the people who are trying to resist the erosion of democracy in the US lack organization and coordination. The things you listed could help them with that, but I don't think that will happen until there's a critical mass of people willing to take risks, and we're still not in the situation where things are bad enough for that to happen.

The first time someone accused me of being a bot because I use em dashes for inserting parentheticals, I was flabbergasted and then pissed off. I have plenty of concerns about GenAI, but I honestly didn't expect one of the problems to be "using a wide variety of punctuation is frowned upon". What's next? "Only bots use the Oxford comma", maybe?

That said, this blog post does seem to use em dashes "incorrectly", at least according to what I've been taught. The way I've been taught to use them, they're not exactly the same thing as a comma and you cannot use them interchangeably. But perhaps I'm nitpicking.

(PS: If it's not clear, I'm not the author of the blog. I'm just someone who hates how the GenAI is contributing to the enshittification of communication.)

What happens? This. This happens, the things we're seeing.

He's already defying multiple court orders and the Congress is not impeaching him. Oh, some of the politicians are introducing articles of impeachment, but you can see quite clearly that this won't go anywhere.

> Answers like this are sort of what makes me wonder what most engineers are smoking when they think AI isn’t valuable.

Honestly, I wonder if I'm living in some parallel universe, because my experience is that "most engineers" are far from that position. The reactions I'm seeing are either "AI is the future" or "I have serious objections to and/or problems with AI".

If you're calling the latter group "the outright dismissal of AI", I would disagree. If I had to call it the outright dismissal of anything, it would be of AI hype.

> I also suspect people who level these criticisms have never really used a frontier LLM.

It's possible. At my workplace, we did a trial of an LLM-based bot that would generate summaries for our GitHub PRs. I have no idea whether it's a "frontier" LLM or not, but I came out of that trial equally impressed, disappointed, and terrified.

Impressed, because its summaries got so many details right. I could immediately see the use for a tool like that: even when the PR author provides a summary of the PR, it's often hard to figure out where to start looking at the PR and in which order to go through changes. The bulleted list of changes from the bot's summary was incredibly useful, especially because it was almost always correct.

Disappointed, because it would often get the most important thing wrong. For the very first PR that I made, it got the whole list of changes right, but the explanation of what the PR did was the opposite of the truth. I made a change to make certain behavior disabled by default and added an option to enable it for testing purposes, and the bot claimed that the behavior was impossible before this change and the PR made it possible if you used this option.

Terrified, because I can see how alluring it is for people to think that they can replace critical thinking with AI. Maybe it's my borderline burnout speaking, but I can easily imagine the future where the pressure from above to be more "efficient" and to reduce costs brings us to the point where we start trusting faulty AI and the small mistakes start accumulating to the point where great damage is done to millions of people.

> Even if the LLM never writes a line of code - this is still valuable, because helping humans understand software faster means you can help humans write software faster.

I have my doubts about this. Yes, if we get an AI that is reliable and doesn't make these mistakes, it can help us understand software faster, as long as we're willing to make the effort to actually understand it, rather than delegating to the AI's understanding.

What I mean by that is that there are different levels of understanding. How deep do you dive before you decide it's "deep enough" and trust what the AI said? This is even more important if you start also using the AI to write the code and not just read it. Now you have even less motivation to understand the code, because you don't have to learn something that you will use to write your own code.

I'll keep learning how to use LLMs, because it's necessary, but I'm very worried about what we seem to want from them. I can't think of any previous technological advance that aimed to replace human critical thinking and creativity. Why are we even pursuing efficiency if it isn't to give us more time and freedom to be creative?

> What’s the government doing to stop the “king” from wrecking the country the government is supposed to serve?

Nothing, because the government can't actually do anything in this situation. Trump's regime exploited the inherent weakness of every government, known from the times of Plato's Republic: quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The government enforces its laws against general populace by means of monopoly on violence. If you and I break the law, we face the consequences outlined by the law. If we continually refuse to comply with those consequences, we will eventually be subjected to state-sanctioned violence until we do so.

But what happens if the government does not follow its own laws? Who enforces those laws? Sure, there are one or more entities whose job is to perform that enforcement, but those entities are also part of the government. What happens when they don't do that job?

The US government is structured in a way that is meant to mitigate that risk. There are different branches, and checks and balances, and all that stuff kids learn in civics classes and immigrants like me learn when we want to apply for naturalization. But these measures only mitigate the risk. They don't remove it completely, because it's ultimately impossible to remove.

Trump's regime has been allowed to circumvent these mitigations and, as a result, we are now in a situation that cannot be resolved by conventional means. If parts of the government try to resolve the constitutional crisis by following the Rule of Law, it will end up being ignored by those parts of the government that are already ignoring the Rule of Law. If those parts try to resolve it without following the Rule of Law, then what's the difference between them and the regime that caused the constitutional crisis in the first place?