edfletcher_t137

> 7. How does gitdot make money?

> We don't.

This cannot last forever. What's the plan when it runs out?

Agentic development. From "chat bot" to bonafide, capable developer. "Oh, shit!"

yep, this has been obvious to a lot of people for awhile. especially after Cherny posted about exactly this in a massively-popular thread... four months ago: https://x.com/bcherny/status/2007179861115511237

Not just the domain: it's an agentic stack! In other words, I could use their product to create the exact type of PRs they're lamenting here.

This is their referenced 2013 paper on the subject:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258423577_Data_Stor...

Clearly they have been working on this for over a decade.

> Of all the ways I used AI, research had by far the highest ratio of value delivered to time spent.

Seconded!

Came here to comment on this line: it completely changes the tone of the article. It's fairly reasonable and neutral until we get here, upon which the antagonism is jarringly clear.

In fact I would posit this is the central crux of the post: OP does not believe those LLM evangelists were ever good programmers.

As others have already noted[1], many well-known excellent programmers - including yourself! and now even Linus! - would beg to differ.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610143

> But for now, I want to emphasize a broader point: I’m hoping 2026 will be the year we stop caring about what people believe AI might do, and instead start reacting to its real, present capabilities.

> So, this is how I’m thinking about AI in 2026. Enough of the predictions. I’m done reacting to hypotheticals propped up by vibes. The impacts of the technologies that already exist are already more than enough to concern us for now…

SPOT ON, let us all take inspiration. "The impacts of the technologies that already exist are already more than enough to concern us for now"!

Working with Andrew Lee on vp.net, who maliciously imploded Freenode some years ago. Birds of a feather...

> YouTube I believe has more viewing hours than Netflix.

Yep by a significant margin in fact https://www.nielsen.com/news-center/2025/streaming-reaches-h...

> Does HBO+Netflix have a 25% share of the streaming market? I've no idea, but possibly.

No, not even close. According to Nielsen from this year, Netflix has only 7.5% of total TV hours and "Warner Bros + Discovery" clocks in at 1.5% ("HBO" as an independent entity is not tracked), for a total of 9%. A whopping 16% to go before crossing that 25% threshold.

https://www.nielsen.com/news-center/2025/streaming-reaches-h...

Those folks who are trying these tools are going to make it through this period. If you're not yet, you won't. Period, end of story.

Those hackers you're so lamenting are gonna make it, but you aren't.

Lack of Claude is a glaring oversight given how popular it is as an agentic coding model...

> If there is AI slop in your codebase it is only because you put it there.

Nailed it, came here to say this.

If anything, this entire post should just be titled "AI PEBKAC".

Don't blame the tool because you're using it wrong.

What The Actual Fuck

"Amusement Park" has to be one of the worst headline choices here. So these people are amused by building killing machines? They are amused that their work is directly related to death & destruction? They are monsters if so.

The first two points directly contradict each other, too. Learning a tool should have the outcome that one is productive with it. If getting to "productive" is non-trivial, then learning the tool is non-trivial.

OP's YT is full-on "old man yelling at clouds" https://www.youtube.com/c/lukesmithxyz

> The perception of privacy is just as important as the technical details that make something actually private. I try very seldom to call for anyone to be fired, but I think whoever authorized this movie ad through Wallet push notifications ought to be canned.

Spot on. Look at it this way: would SJ have allowed this to happen? Absolutely not. And if it somehow had happened while he were still there, he would've unquestionably (and quickly) fired the responsible parties.

> The black hole universe also offers a new perspective on our place in the cosmos. In this framework, our entire observable universe lies inside the interior of a black hole formed in some larger “parent” universe.

Does it also follow that black holes in our universe contain universes internally, beyond their event horizons?! Seems like it should. Mind-blowing.

> So I’ll keep being skeptical, until it’s over.

I feel you've misunderstood the moment. There is no "over". This is it.

> One such example would be to do a live code review. This could be done asynchronously or synchronously. It could allow actually talking through topics and issues that relate to the challenges in a real software project. This would allow to surface much more of the knowledge in an experienced software engineer.

From my understanding of the post, this was the initial screening phase as it was in response to OP's application. In other words, this is what every candidate who passes the application screen (the weakest one) is sent.

Let's say they have 100 candidates for this role. A proper code review here should take ~45 minutes to an hour. Even 15% of the candidates requesting a full code review - regardless of synchronicity - represents a 11.25-to-15 hour time commitment from the hiring team. For the initial screen. That is asinine. No proper organization would accept such a large time sink for so few candidates at this phase.

As I've said already multiple times in this thread, OP very clearly does not understand the asynchronous relationship at play here, and then based much of their interactions & interpretations on this misunderstanding.

> A little intuition and empathy can tell you that they probably are not going to spend many hours reviewing a complex submission, so the project should optimize for demonstrability of code quality, not completeness.

> "I would like to know what kind of response I could expect..." - This is also established from the beginning: you can expect either a "Looks good, let's do some interviews" or a "Sorry, not interested," based on the code you submit. They can't narrow down the choices prior to your submission, because they're grading your submission, not your proposal document with an extensive list of details that they already told you they're mostly ambivalent to.

Absolutely spot on, and you ID it later with "Main character syndrome", but it is so very clear from this post's tone & content that OP expected a symmetric outlay of effort & focus from the company's side. They thought they were the main character.

That's a fundamental misunderstanding that seems to have predicated a lot of their ultimate response: they feel as if they were entitled to much more effort from the company than they received. Such is often the case with strong entitlement, it's nearly impossible for the person suffering it to see it.

OP didn't take into account the (great) asymmetry between themselves and the hiring manager, then built an entire lament on that. Dealing with this job req is likely just one of many day-to-day responsibilities the HM has and frankly I'm impressed they responded with three whole sentences. One method we can use to handle such ambiguity is to "make your best judgement" based on your skills, knowledge and experience (things that are tested for in the hiring process, incidentally), because often you may not get the answer you want or expect if any at all.

Not what was expected of them. I included "minimum-viable" in my original reply for a specific reason: to counter OP's lament that they lost out to a simpler solution.

If you are asked to implement X and instead you take extra time and come back with X+Y+Z, what have you done? Wasted time e.g. money. Companies really hate wasting money.

So if in your candidate project you demonstrate a propensity for bike-shedding any task, that's gonna be a big red flag.

Building a concrete, working, minimum-viable solution from ambiguous requirements: that's the point of the exercise. That's what hiring managers want in candidates because those candidates end up being good at building a concrete, working solutions from ambiguous requirements. Which is every software project ever. Although the AI Age has unquestionably changed the efficacy of this kind of candidate screening, that is orthogonal to this discussion. For many years it has been one of the most-effective ways to screen for the ability to build concrete, working solutions from ambiguous requirements. Which is every software project ever. So it's no surprise it persists.

> Also, I might as well come out and say this: one reason I don’t want to use Github is because it’s the most popular place to host your code.

It's the goth subculture of software development! Because it's popular, it must be eschewed.

Geez.

Adults of all stripes - and of all socioeconomic backgrounds - manage to pull themselves out of funks all the time without needing to write woe-is-me blog posts about it.

That our wealth-worship culture has gone so far and gotten so bad that we're supposed to give any fucks about this "zeroth-world struggle" is absolutely asinine.

We are truly on The Worst Timeline, without doubt.

(It shouldn't surprise anyone that OP "larped as Elon" and "had a brief stint at DOGE"...)

Thank you so much OP for writing this, and I hope it resonates not just with maintainers (or potential maintainers) but to users of FOSS too. You needed to write this - specifically, the "Baseline" section, which I agree with vigorously - because too many users of FOSS consider themselves entitled to continued maintenance, support, feature development, community fostering, etc. etc.

We (maintainers) owe you NONE OF THAT. We gave you our code. That. Is. Enough.

The utter lack of screenshots doesn't help either. I also read those pages and am also still unsure of what this is.