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I don't know if it's just more media attention recently or what not, but I used to joke about not wanting to go to China because of these similar reasons. Strange feeling to recommend to friends visiting the US to now be just as careful. That story is honestly insane.

at risk of sounding like a grandpa this is nothing like SO. AI is just a tool for sure, one that "can" behave like an super enhanced SO and Google, but for the first time ever it can actually write for you and not just piddly lines but entire codebases.

i think that represents a huge paradigm shift that we need to contend with. it isn't just "better" research. and i say this as someone who welcomes all of this that has come.

IMO the skill gap just widens exponentially now. you will either have the competent developers who use these tools accelerate their learning and/or output some X factor, and on the other hand you will have literally garbage being created or people who just figure out they can now expend 1/10 the effort and time to do something and just coast, never bother to even understand what they wrote.

just encountered that with some interviews where people can now scaffold something up in record time but can't be bothered to refine it because they don't know how. (ex. you have someone prompting to create some component and it does it in a minute. if you request a tweak, because they don't understand it they just keep trying re-prompt and micromanage the LLM to get the right output when it should only take another minute for someone experienced.)

parts of the article are spot on. after the magic has worn off i find it's best to literally treat it like another person. would you blindly merge code from someone else or huge swaths of features? no. i have to review every single piece of code, because later on when there's a bug or new feature you have to have that understanding.

another huge thing for me has been to scaffold a complex feature just to see what it would do. just start out with literal garbage and an idea and as long as it works you can start to see if something is going to pan out or not. then tear it down and do it again with those new assumptions you learned. keep doing it until you have a clear direction.

or sometimes my brain just needs to take a break and i'll work on boilerplate stuff that i've been meaning to do or small refactors.

maybe my settings were off but i tried aider when it first came out and kept coming back to it and it ended up being super slow and generating subpar stuff compared to just chat. actually turned me off to CLI based style code assistants.

claude code blew my mind, however. really great for refactoring existing stuff with a proper CLAUDE.md file or one-shotting small features. i mainly use it for scaffolding, sounding board and refactoring but it's been a game changer (albeit more expensive).

still like to use boring chat-based and pasting back and forth as it helps me approach and understand issues better for later on. i find generating huge blocks of code/files to feel like magic but then u dig into a bug later and find the LLM wrote or structured a bunch of semi-garbage that you have to undo.

I think about this from time to time and I suppose everything is cyclical in the end. Most of us would have been some peasant in the feudal age and when it gets really bad it always ends in a revolution of some sort. It's just on a global scale and timeframe now.

As more of the population feels the effects of inequality they won't appeased by just fancy toys and shiny things, they will want change by force. My only solace is I'll probably be long dead by the time that happens.

then he basically successfully fooled you and rewrote history, mission accomplished. more like the director has beef with theater and attempts to burn the entire thing down while gaslighting the cast and crew. you may have no time for internet drama, but comments like this perpetuate the bad actors.

yeah i concede i don't know everything, but honestly if you're not from or living in the US i would also re-examine your view of things. you have a different objective view but miss a lot of the context. it's easy to intellectualize the whole situation and come up with these solutions. this kind of reasoning is what i've gone through already trying to make excuses for people and it sounds nice on paper but it doesn't hold.

i'll tell you from personal experience there exists huge swaths of people in my community that voted for trump not because of any of his policies or a feeling that dems didn't bring change, but because they worship him like a religious figure. or they demonize anything that isn't conservative and treat it like team sports. it really doesn't seem to be much more complicated than that for some people no matter what angle you try to come in with (lack of education, not tending to their needs, etc.)

i don't even want to give people that benefit at this point. used to think that it was education, circumstances, outside forces, culture, etc. like "if only" we had XYZ then we can prevent this.

at this point i just want to call it "stupidity". not even a left vs right thing. there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things work. they will always be taken advantage of, scammed, etc. social media and tech just made this 10x more effective.

it's how you have populations repeatedly making the same damn mistakes century after century just in a different form. it's baked into our DNA i suppose.

maybe i'm just cynical have given up. it's a really jarring thing to encounter people who refuse to even spend the min effort to attempt to question their own beliefs.

imo we are seeing two types of programming viewports emerge.

i mean maybe it's just me but i quite like this new normal where i'm an "intermediary". i review every line that comes out and research things if they don't make sense or i'm confused. and a lot of times it helps me figure out how to approach a problem or refine an existing one. i'm still architecting everything and diving in.

i guess if you liken progamming to like i dunno, chopping your own tree down, turning it into 2x4s to build a house then yeah, it seems like your skills are atrophying.

i do not miss the "joy" of writing random boilerplate 100s of times or variations of the same function. i do however fear for the the new generation who maybe didn't cut their teeth on having minimal guidance. i can totally see people just coasting and blindly pasting things, but that's always sort of existed on stack exchange, etc.

i don't think you read the article or understand the current context.

he has two entities, a private business (Automattic) which is separate from the WP.org side which he has said since the beginning as being "community run", but is now apparently his personal property and we were all just playing his garden.

you keep talking as if WP in its current form is only because of paid devs and the maintainer. thousands of other contributors made it what it is today, all with the assumption that it was governed a certain way.

all OSS has this inherent issue. the for-profit gatekeeps what goes into core or can steer/block things to keep things advantageous only to them. it's why the questions around governance are even being asked. if you can't understand why this conflict could be a problem then i'm not sure what to say.

this is faulty logic. you are taking two overlapping issues and framing them as an either/or. matt could easily have removed the conflict interest while not "giving up" on wordpress and continuing to contribute. it's about anticipating any future issues that could arise through governance, not that matt should just stop working on wordpress altogether.

so yes, absolutely WP would be in a better place now had he just removed that aspect of his involvement. by 2010 WP was an ecosystem that was more than just the founder. and ben cook isn't just "some guy".

and more historical context if you want to see what happened to mr. cook and the pattern of retaliation by matt.

https://web.archive.org/web/20231004222821/https://wpblogger...

the funny thing is i didn't even really care about who ran WP since a few months ago, but due to all the drama u can easily dig this stuff up now and it's not pretty.

I thought that too until you go down the rabbit hole and realize it's been this way since apparently the beginning. It's also interesting to note just how hard everyone was tearing the author apart in the comments only for it to basically become true a decade later.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110117190122/http://wpblogger....

I guess money is just some force multiplier for negative aspects of someone's personality. Just never get to see it in the beginning.

I know assholes like this exist everywhere, but it's the constant need to re-affirm that he's the "nice guy" while brazenly punching you in the face that unsettles me somehow. At least I know what I'm getting with certain politicians or tech moguls when they speak heh.

I guess the pettiness can continue to reach new lows

the irony of this entire post ranting about the views of "children" (classified as people under...30?) when presented with evidence contrary to your beliefs.

i mean, obviously advances in modern medicine has saved lives. it's not like i want to go back to the stone age. it would help to understand the point i'm making first.

you know those movies where all humans band together in the face of adversity? i now know the reality is that it will be full of nonstop misinformation and political infighting along the way. i suppose i understood it on an intellectual level but seeing it play out is something different. we are more idiocracy than contagion.

same. we probably encounter this type of thing every 100 or so years for centuries, just enough for the previous generation to die off and the new generation to make all the same dumb mistakes again.

i mean in the end, barring some big issue like addiction or something that's actively harming the relationship, often times you just aren't compatible. maybe you fell out of love or had different priorities. whatever the reason is, it's over, one or both parties don't want to try anymore, which is fine. if people want to go over the details as some kind of post-mortem sometimes that's appreciated but other times yeah, it's something you probably shouldn't say and it just makes the hurt worse.

i guess my slight issue with the post was just that he posted it for all the world to see as some kind of honest self-reflection when to me it was just some throwaway line. i know he didn't even intend for it to be anything so in the end it's whatever.

it's more about the reasons, not who is initiating it or wants it. in any case, i find more often it's just a generic line that people use when breaking up to spare the other party some grief. otherwise it ends up with the other person thinking about what they could have done differently to "keep" the other person.

I don't know anything about his situation, but I will say one of the lamest things ever when breaking up is to say it's not you, it's me heh. I mean that's probably something everyone hears face to face and I get it, nobody wants to hurt someones feelings to give their "real" reason when what's done is done, but to see it articulated on a blog post as some kind transparent confession is a little surprising.

Like unless maybe you were going thru some massive event that was very clearly damaging to your relationship (drugs, abuse, etc), the optics of finding yourself to end a seemingly great relationship after selling a company for mega millions isn't going to jive with a lot of people. But the again I guess that's the point of the post, there is no point or purpose. Alright, taking off my judgement hat now.

Very interesting, I also got Spanish, Chinese, and english. Lifelong midwesterner here as well. Maybe there's something to the midwest.

I dunno, I mean he could have applied the "fix" in a more cold and calculated method. Tons of PE companies out here doing the same and squeezing the stone without resorting to random personal attacks of those they disagreed with. Everything just had this air of pettiness to it instead.

I stopped following it for a bit after the initial drama after Matt had repeated meltdowns and showed his true face in all of this. It was just tiring try to fight all the non-stop gaslighting which was probably part of the strategy. Any leg he had to stand on was betrayed by his tantrums. Good to see some movement.

Really jarring reading that. I think I was in middle school when the AOL and the "internet" to me became a thing (lol) and sure there was a lot of time wasting stuff (chatrooms, games, etc.) but there was a huge huge field of just exploration and learning. I cut my tech teeth on that; minimal parent supervision, no gamifying or artificial motivators, just my curiosity.

I feel for kids nowadays. It was the wild west back then, everything was basically unrestricted and nobody had any clue of the consequences, but we didn't have companies actively trying to addict us to stuff.

No idea what the answer is.

I mean, I grew up in a conservative state and a small/medium sized city that has always been red. Not every one is a "redneck retarded bigot". I don't think most of them aren't as openly racist as made out to be. Outside of politics you wouldn't even think anything was too out of the ordinary.

That said, I'm not sure stuff like "He's annointed by God", "He tells it like it is/Isn't afraid to speak his mind", "Liberals are evil/devil/<insert literally any reason to hate them> " is stuff you want to hear, but it does represent a somewhat overall sentiment (generalized of course).

More centered around ignorance and perceived old "conservative values". I find very few people actually able to articulate their points.

I bought that line in 2016 and again in 2020. I'm not saying I'm done with trying to understand, but that level of fks to give is very minimal now.

Obviously, I don't think 50% of the population is stupid, but every time I try to "understand" it's becoming increasingly clear it's about his "charisma" and "our team" and less about hard policies.

People out here voting against their own interests or blaming things on ignorance (inflation, etc.).

Just have a backup plan for distribution that doesn't involve touching any of Automattic/Matt's personal property (wordpress.org, wordpress.com, pressable, etc.) if you go that route.

I think the recent spat is just the eventual writing on the wall for WP, albeit a very long death. As an enterprise I wouldn't touch the WP ecosystem moving forward if I could help it but if you're writing plugins for the average joe there's probably still life there.

i mean i don't considere issues closed or tickets open to be "looking over my shoulder", but i guess we disagree there. these are some metrics that need to be looked at at some point to determine some strategy about the future or reflect on the past.

"trust" to me is knowing that everyone that has access to these metrics are making decisions in good faith. it's knowing that your boss isn't sitting there watching it every hour or using it as some simple metric to axe you. blame the people not the tools.

i don't understand how this is punishing the good people... i think everyone here has some ptsd with terrible managers or others micromanaging their work. data a good way to look back and ask the questions that might need to be asked, but to not use the data as the final criteria for anything (which is where i think most lazy managers end up).

do companies plan their strategy with zero data? i find it hilarious we devs somehow think we are a special group that can't be measured at all, so just don't bother and let us be. at the same time we don't want managers up in our business all the time either. just because the measurement isn't perfect doesn't mean to not measure at all.

did i say that? that's why i said it's an indicator, one of many. if you are producing zero code vs your peers and your job is to program it doesn't mean you are unproductive, but at least someone can talk to you about it and clarify vs. just guessing with zero data.