jacobsenscott

> writing the code to reproduce it

I'm super excited for all the free money and data our new AI written apps will be giving away.

Careful though - remember what George Carlin has to say about forming groups https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m6TSv2vtvQ

This is gold, and hilarious. I get why someone would "spy" on rippling for money, but my god, don't use a phone. And why would you even need to be on prem to do this kind of spying? There are so many better ways.

If you've never worked at a company that uses rippling or deel you wouldn't. They are niche HR tools, mostly targeting smaller companies.

Yes, essentially on the fly editable aliases. Fish is so good. I assume there's a zsh plugin that mimics that functionality - zsh people should try it.

Engineers who care about good engineering are pretty much a thing of the past. Today the game is buffing your resume with as many complex tools as possible, and jumping to the next thing before your pile of complexity crumbles under its own weight.

It is hidden behind a keyboard shortcut -there is no menu. cmd-shift-g I think. But it is literally the only way I know to get to folders besides the designated shortcuts (documents, pictures, etc) and I've been a daily mac user for many years.

I was around before the clean code movement, and like all software movements, it was a reaction to real problems in the software industry. Massive procedural functions with deeply nested conditionals, no structure, global variables, no testing at all. That was all the norm.

Clean Code pushed things in a better direction, but it over-corrected. In many ways APOSD (published in 2018) is a correction against the excesses of Clean Code (published in 2008).

Will people swing too far back, to giant methods, deeply nested conditionals, etc? I don't know. But probably.

The goal has always been to eliminate programmers.

Nobody wants to pay a bunch of desk workers six figures to make their business go brr, but they currently they have no choice. Trust me, every executive resents this to their core and they want all the programmers to go away - including github executives.

20 years ago you would hire a few expensive architects who would try and design the product in so much detail cheap jr programmers could build it. It didn't go well.

4GL languages tried to abstract away all the hard stuff - again it didn't go well.

"Low code" was big just before the AI thing. It didn't go well.

Attempts are outsourcing are constant.

Now we have LLMs. So far this has come the closest to the dream of eliminating expensive programmers. We'll see how it goes.

There is foundational knowledge you must have memorized through a combination of education and experience to be a software developer. The standard must be higher than "can use google and cut and paste." The answer can't always be - "I don't need to be able to recall that on command, I can google/chatgpt that when I end up needing it." Would you go to a surgeon who says "I don't need to know exactly where the spleen is, I can simply google it during surgery."

If you are pretending to have knowledge and skills you don't have you are cheating. And if you have the required knowledge and skill AI is a hindrance, not a help. You can solve the problem easily without it. So "is using ai cheating"? IDK, but logically you wouldn't use AI unless you were cheating.

What's it called when you describe an app with sufficient detail that a computer can carry out the processes you want? Where will the record of those clarifying questions and updates be kept? What if one developer asks the AI to surreptitiously round off pennies and put those pennies into their bank account? Where will that change be recorded, will humans be able to recognize it? What if two developers give it conflicting instructions? Who's reviewing this stream of instructions to the LLM?

"AI" driven programming has a long way to go before it is just a better code completion.

As a long time heroku user, I'll never go back to heroku. They've been working on wild card ssl for years and can't get it done. I finally hacked it into our app with about 100 lines of ruby. They are literally doing nothing but keeping the lights on until the last customer drops off.

A lot of apps never grow to that size, and can run on services like render or heroku forever, saving millions of dollars in devops cost (the most expensive part of devops is the devops engineer).

A good number of companies out there move to google scale infrastructure and spin up whole devops teams when they would be fine without all that out of fear of having to move later. That later might never come.

The main thing a good manager can do is act as a wall between the engineers and everyone above them, which is hard to do politically because it exposes a whole subtree of the org chart as useless.

I just got one. It is silent according to my wife. It is kind of loud for me because it is blowing air into my nose which makes noise inside my head. But I like white noise - helps with the tinnitus.

Yes, but you're starting to get to the size where you need some real PG expertise to keep the wheels on. If your data is growing CH will just work out of box for a lot longer.

This is what we do - works well.

It isn't that common to need fractions though. Money is typically handled in integer amounts (we just divide the amounts by 100 or whatever to make it easier for humans to grok). Nobody's going to pay half a cent for a latte for example. If for some reason you do need to deal with 1/1000 of a dollar, or 1/10000 of a dollar, you can still use integers. You just need to know the scaling factor.

Your presentation layer is probably always going to need to do some manipulation of the number anyway (put a dollar sign on it, etc) so using a decimal amount just for presentation needs isn't a huge win. But it will work too.

Interesting - though it probably just soft of devolves to using hot keys (hopefully those exist) to jump between files after a few editors are open. Panning around with even half a dozen files open would get tedious.

You don't need tor for terrorism or identity theft, and it probably isn't widely used in those circles. There are easier ways. But plenty of people use tor to avoid what amount to terrorist govenments and regimes.

That's 0.001% of the workplaces out there. But good for them. Do you think it actually improved software quality, or was it all busy work?

Removing the tedium frees your brain up to focus on the interesting parts of the problem. The "actual mental labor" is the fun part. So I like that.

> Also, I've personally seen more interest in AI in devs that have little interest in technology, but a big interest in delivering. PMs love them though.

You get what you measure. Nobody measure software quality.

You overestimate the ability of an insurance company to make use of AI - it will take them years of meetings, internal political maneuvering, technical failures, etc. Individuals can basically start using chatgpt today.

Yes, the asymmetry is how it is designed, but generative AI can turn the tables there. You should be able to sic an AI on the company and go back to watching your (AI generated) shows on netflix.

It's weird you use your insurance to get a routine shot or exam. I don't use my car insurance to put gas in my car, or get the brake pads changed. I use it when someone does thousands of dollars of damage to my car.

You always have politics. Managers tend to be political ninjas, so they make it worse. I've been programming professionally for over 25 years at this point, worked at many places, and I couldn't tell you what value a manager brings. I know what they do - which is hold meetings that take time away from real work, and ask people "is it done yet". But I've never seen anything get done faster or better as a result of something a manager did.

I'm genuinely curious to hear from people who have had what they consider effective management, what did the manager do to make your work better?

Yup - all the basic HTML injection and xss attacks apply. All the OWASP webdev 101 security issues that have been mostly solved by web frameworks are back in force with AI.

What's happening here is you can make the slack AI hallucinate a message that never existed by telling it to combine your private messages with another message in a public channel in arbitrary ways.

Slack claims it isn't a problem because the user doing the "ai assisted" search has permission to both the private and public data. However that data never existed in the format the AI responds with.

An attacker can make it return the data in such a way that just clicking on the search result makes private data public.

This is basic html injection using AI as the vector. I'm sure slack is aware how serious this is, but they don't have a quick fix so they are pretending it is intended behavior.