jopsen

There will probably be some yolo startups that deploy write-only code to production with unreviewed terraform plans -- who knows this could be disruptive -- but I'm also certain this won't be the last such story.

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All that being said: it's kind of sad because terraform is fairly declarative and the plans are fairly high-level.

Hence, terraform files and plans are the stuff you should review.

Where as a bunch of imperative code implementing CRUD with fancy UI might be the kind of spaghetti code that's hard to review.

10 years ago self-driving EVs were going to make it so nobody owns a car.

There was a lot of hype. We are possibly still on track to get to that world. But it might easily take another 10-20 years :)

AI will change things, but don't underestimate the timeline.

Also even if we get a super intelligence in a box, it probably won't fold my laundry. Super intelligence might not unlock as much as we dream.

What about reparations? :)

This is an illegal war of aggressions after all.

The justifications all remain fanciful. I mean at least Bush bothered to make it appear legitimate.

> I hope we keep making room for “luxury software”

The risk of making the source in a compiler a black box is pretty high.

Because of your program is black box compiled with a block box, things might get really sporty.

There are many platform libraries and such that we probably do not want as black boxes, ever. That doesn't mean an AI can't assist, but that you'll still rewrite and review whatever insights you got from the AI.

If latest game or instagram app is black box nobody can decipher, who cares? If such app goes to be a billion dollar success, I'll feel sorry for engineers tasked with figuring why the computer says no.

Short of hitting the US mainland.

I doubt there is anything Iran can do that make the US put boots on the ground.

There is no appetite for boots on the ground in the US. And no coalition behind the US.

> The point is preventing another North Korea style nuclear blackmail state.

You can bomb the leadership all day long.

Without boots on the ground the regime will probably continue.

I don't see how this stops Iran from building nukes. Sure they may have a temporary set back.

But do you think this will change their minds?

Can they even negotiate a resolution with the US. Given that the current administration won't honor its own agreements.

Did Trump issue an ultimatum here? And demand something?

I'm not so sure.

I think Trump would taco.

A carrier is fair game, especially when you shoot first.

There wouldn't be a coalition with half of Europe. Because of bridges burned.

Hmm, I'm not sure trading is an alliance.

I doubt NK sent anything to Russia without payment in hard currency (gold).

Given that we now that to deploy troops to prevent the US from invading Greenland.

I'd agree, it's not a given that the US can count on Europe in a conflict with China.

But probably Europe wouldn't be trading with China or anything.

It's just given the treatment of the US administration, the US probably can't build a volunteer coalition like I Iraq - unless there is an attack on US mainland.

Agreed, nobody is going to help out Iran.

If anyone does it'll be China giving them missiles to hit a US boat.

That would make the US turn tail. Not start a war with China.

As for Iranian leadership, they just need to dig deep and wait this out. I can't imagine they don't have plenty of hardened bunkers.

> North Korea is in such poor shape that they probably can't maintain much of the equipment

Sadly we know from events in Ukraine that NK artillery works and that they have plenty of it. Yes, it's poor quality, but far from harmless.

Also to be clear: artillery is not exactly rocket science. They idea that NK doesn't have huge stockpiles is ludicrous.

Even when it's operating normal the webapp is constantly crashing.

Mobile app stops working..

It's a pain.

At least right now.

True, but the cost of producing large amounts of cheap code just dropped by an order of magnitude (of maybe 3).

That's an interesting take.

It does assume that more intelligence is both possible and useful -- that's probably not unlikely.

> good at using coding agents is reading and understanding code.

You can understand the code using an agent; it's much faster than reading the code.

I think the argument the author is making is that: given this magic oracle that make code, how we so contain and control it.

This is about abstractions and invariants and those will remain important.

Would I use a write-only HTML sanitizer for untrusted HTML: No!

Would I care to review CSS, if my site "looks" good? No!

The challenge becomes: how can we enforce invariants/abstractions etc without inspecting the code.

Type systems, model checking, static analysis. Could become new power tools.

But sound design probably still goes far.

If AES just specified that you pick a random IV and prepend it to the cipher text, then users of crypto libraries wouldn't need to know what an IV is. Right?

He can just ignore the courts.

Unless congress is willing to impeach him, he can run wild.

> The existing brands keep going because big companies and institutions don't pay for products vibe coded...

But what about 5 years from now?

What when the menus have the same layout, compatibility with the legacy binary file format is near perfection.

Today, alternatives exists, but they are not polished the same way.

> You have big tech oligarchs salivating at the idea of moar profits by firing a bunch of people.

For big tech to start relying on vibe coding without code reviews etc is a huge risk.

Big tech has so much red tabe preventing people from getting stuff done. Security reviews needed, etc. This inertia will hold back even a super intelligence from getting stuff done.

Some nerds in a garage trying to apply vibe coding to a problem won't have this red tape.

Red tape is necessary in big orgs because you can't have 100k people running around shipping new half broken, semi supported software with security holes. So you established release processes, approvals, code reviews, etc.

All I'm saying is: big tech is also at risk of being disrupted by AI.

We don't know if there will be software improvements leaving the AI data centers as stranded assets.

We don't know if software product like Adobe suite will be irrelevant or cloned with vibe coding.

The assumption that inference with sota won't be local in 5 years is not certain.

> Obviously all of the gains are going to go to capital.

Right now sota models requires a lot of iron.

It's possible that this will always be the case. But its is not a certainty!

We've seen software improvements shave orders of magnitude of compute requirements before. This could totally happen here. Iron could easily become stranded assets.

But that said, models have already become commodities, well somewhat. Is the value in running inference or applying it?

Today, we dare not use vibe coded libraries for mission critical things, HTML sanitization as an example.

But one day, who is to say the industry won't be disrupted by a vibe coded database with ~100% Oracle compatibility? Made by a nerd in a garage.

Established code bases is a moat today. It might not be in 5 years. Big tech won't be well positioned to take advantage, because trusting vibe coded crap is risky.

My point is mostly: the future is uncertain. Big established software companies might see their moat challenged by nerd in a garage running LLMs in the cloud.

What about the Adobe suite? AutoCAD? Office, etc. (To be fair, it's possible that software never was the moat).

Institutions like the EU are hard to build. It's easy to leave or destroy an institution. Much harder to reform or improve it.

The idea that we should have free trade and movement within Europe is not bad. Even unified regulation, etc.

Otherwise, we'll never have to scale to be competitive in the world.

The regulation could be better, less red tape. But that's always the case, everywhere.

But at the end of the day there isn't going to be an alternative to the EU in Europe. So it's better to remain in, and try to improve (yes, this is hard and slow).

The alternative is nothing, maybe a few remote trading partners, but physical proximity matters if you want industrial integration/growth.

I don't think the administration cares about the appearance of impropriety.

Yeah, tax payers will pay the refund, and the interest accrued on the refund -- when the makaes it's wats through the courts in 3 years

> The difference this time is the scale is orders of magnitude larger.

The administration will just do nothing. They need 3 maneuvers for this to drag out longer than Trump 2.

There is no intention to follow the law here.

> Apple will not do anything for actual malware when reported with receipts, besides sending you a form letter assuring you "experts will look into it, now fuck off"

Ask while you are in an EU country, request appeal and initiate Out-of-court dispute resolution.

Or better yet: let the platform suck, and let this be the year of the linux desktop on iPhone :)

This only benefits expensive proprietary enterprise 3D print makers..

I'd you team bought the latest IDE for $200/mo and was able to finish tickets, you 50% of your team be laid off?

Or would you just do more stuff?

I feel like most software projects have an endless backlog.

Better IDEs, programming languages, packages, frameworks, etc have increased our productivity, reduced bugs -- but rarely reduced headcount.

Ever hard anyone migrate from php+jQuery to react+node and reduce head count due to increased productivity?

I sometimes reminiscent about the LAMP stack being super productive. But at the time I didn't write tests :)

> it is straight-up irresponsible to forgo making a contingency plan.

What contingencies can you really make?

Start training a physical trade, maybe.

If this the end of SWE jobs, you better ride the wave. Odds are you're estimate on when AI takes over are off by half a career, anyways.