ryandvm

Yeah. I love how the guy behind DOGE has benefited more from US federal largess than any other person on Earth.

You're right, but it's not just Microsoft.

I've been doing software engineering for 20+ years. I've been at a lot of different companies and at almost every single one I'm always kind of flabbergasted at how shabby the engineering is. I think maybe ONCE in my career did I work somewhere that I was proud of the engineering we were doing and it was a 18 month consulting gig at a startup with 3 engineers.

This isn't hubris, I am part of the problem. Too few engineers working with overly vague requirements with not enough time always results in the same thing. We are all churning out products we should be embarrassed about.

Microsoft might be the largest, most flagrant example, but code base entropy is a rampant force of nature. It is everywhere. Google Home gets steadily worse every week. How? They have like 100,000 engineers. Can they not spare a dozen of them to keep that product from being abject shit?

Is there a solution? I don't know, but maybe LLMs replacing 80% of us is exactly what we deserve.

It is now significantly harder to figure out who understands the systems and is using AI effectively and who doesn't know shit and is just slinging LLM copypasta around. Before 2025, the underperformers/coasters were at least relatively identifiable by the paucity of their contributions. Now all of the sudden every single engineer is filing PRs, code reviews, technical design documents, and every other artifact under the sun with perfect formatting and at least superficial plausibility. This is mostly due to incredible pressure from the C-level for every engineer to be using as much AI as possible, but it's also just a game theory respopnse because it's in every engineer's best interest to be as prolific as possible.

We are absolutely drowning in documentation and code that seems legit and the only recourse is to lean on AI to help process the sheer quantity of it. I have a feeling that the fallout from this phase of the industry is going to be an exotic form of technical debt that is remarkable mostly in its enormity.

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None of this would have happened if Anthropic had just bought a few million dollars worth of Trumpcoin :melting_face:

“It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds?” -Norm MacDonald

Yeah, pretty much all systems of governance ultimately evolve until their primary purpose is actually ensuring the survival of the system of governance and anything else it accomplishes is kind of a side effect. It's probably some sort of informational axiom of rules systems in general whether bureaucratic or biological or whatever.

Hell, DNA is just rules about what you can build and it's primary purpose is just making sure the rules survive. All the wonderful complexity and diversity of life is a side effect of the little changes necessary to propagate the rules.

I like how 15 years on, we're not even pretending that blockchain has practical uses besides buying drugs and gambling.

There's a certain refreshing clarity in this current kleptocratic moment - everyone is just openly engaged in fraud. Okay, I guess that's better than pretending they weren't.

Same recipe as the Mars colonization. There is absolutely zero chance of a self-sustaining colony on Mars in the next 50 years, but boy will he get rich if we try...

I dunno, data centers in space seems even more outlandish than P2P space travel. The math on the orbital data center idea indicates that these things would need hundreds of thousands of square meters of radiative cooling. Absolutely bonkers that anyone is falling for this shit.

I don't doubt the Neo is a quality product, but I'm curious whether cheap MacBooks are going to sabotage Apple's cachet as a luxury brand. It's my personal experience that iOS users tend to look down on "green bubbles" in a way that can only be explained as some sort of brand superiority complex.

I'm sure millionaires wouldn't appreciate it if Lamborghini sold a $25K model...

I'd say they are especially not safe. Nobody believes they can replace everyone with AI like the AI Kool-Aid drinking leadership.

Wild that the guy whose decisions are directly responsible for driving profitability into the ground is somehow the reason these companies have 300+ PE valuations.

I've definitely noticed a distinct lack of pride now that Claude Code is writing 90% of the code I'm delivering these days. For simple problems (which most are) it works well enough and you are definitely shipping code faster - and with actual test coverage to boot. But it just doesn't feel the same - there's little craftsmanship and honestly it's boring as fuck. You spend a lot of time setting up guardrails and having it produce plans that you then have to refactor multiple times. It's impressive that LLMs can do this, but it's not particularly enjoyable. I guess I was a "writing code was the fun part" guy.

Semi-related, but I really want to see the long term maintenance outcomes of all code being produced by these software engineers that were apparently just closeted project managers. I feel like having 50% of the engineers in this industry just telling Claude Code, "yeah that looks good to me" 150 times a day is going to result in an incredible amount of software rewriting.

100%

LLMs didn't make me rewrite my understanding of intelligence. It made me wonder just how intelligent anybody is.

"It's not smart, it's just predicting the next most likely token."

It is not at all clear to me that perhaps that is exactly what I'm doing too. I have no idea where my sentences are going. Try to express one of your own thoughts backwards. It sure seems like we're all just predicting the next most likely token...

"Mind rape" is obviously an attention grabbing way of putting it, but I tend to agree that advertising is essentially theft.

It goes something like this:

   * You only have a finite amount of attention. You cannot obviously "pay attention" to everything around you.
   * When someone takes your attention, they are consuming some of your finite resource.
   * Taking something from someone else is the very definition of theft.

Now obviously we have social norms around attention that allow for a reasonable amount of this non-consensual attention consumption. Things like, make your signage inoffensive, unobtrusive, and generally placed in a way that it is a net positive (the hot dog prices should be near the hot dog vendor).

But what we don't have, at least in the US, are strong laws and norms that protect people from this. Why does an lawyer get to steal my attention on the beach with a plane dragging a banner? Why does a storefront get to blast an ad at me when I walk by? Does anybody really think these examples are a net societal benefit?

And like Google and Meta, these companies are going to morph into advertising giants. Advertising is an economic black hole and it eats everything that comes close.

I disagree. We are currently in a weird period where these frontier AI companies are losing tons of money even on the subscription-based AI models. It's just too compute intensive and there's no way most people are going to be buying the kind of hardware required to run $20 worth of inference every day.

Sadly - it's going to be ads. Advertising is going to get in there and enshittify the whole thing because as always, advertising income is too easy and too plentiful for any company to resist.

Right now the models are fairly agnostic, but we are a hair-breadth away from ChatGPT responding with, "the right tool for this job is a circular saw - something like the Milwaulkee M18, which happens to be on sale at Home Depot this weekend."

Especially when it comes to CEOs. I have worked at companies where the CEOs literally offered nothing but the skill of being friends with other CEOs.

There's something to be said for the fact that the current crop of plutocrats just show their whole asses.

wat

Tech company leadership gleefully replacing engineers with AI is going to be an incredibly short-lived era. I'll admit I was a little shocked at just how susceptible software engineering was to the brute force of LLMs, but man, wait until they find out just how easy it is for an LLM to do their jobs.

This isn't stopping until it gets all the way up to the asset holders.

Yup. To succeed materially in this world, you need two of the following three: skill, luck, ruthlessness.

I dunno, man. I've been doing this for 20+ years and I think we're at a really important fork in the road where there are two possibilities.

The first is that AI is achieving human-level expertise and capability, but since they're now being increasingly trained on their own output they are fighting an uphill battle against model collapse. In that case, perhaps AI is going to just sort of max out at "knowing everything" and maybe agentic coding is just another massive paradigm shift in a long line of technological paradigm shifts and the tooling has changed but total job market collapse is unlikely.

The other possibility is that we're going to continue to see escalating AI capability with regard to context, information retrieval, and most importantly "cognition" (whatever that means). Maybe we overcome the challenges of model collapse. Maybe we figure out better methodologies for training that don't end up just producing a chatbot version of Stack Overflow + Wikipedia + Reddit. Maybe we actually start seeing AI create and not just recreate.

If it's the latter, then I think engineers who think they are going to stay ahead of AI sound an awful lot like saddle makers who said "pffft, these new cars can only go 5 miles per hour."

With all due respect, nobody deserves this more than the individuals involved.

Unproductive tangent: Why do we call it "hallucinationing" instead of "bullshitting" when that is so clearly what it is?

If I'm talking to a guy that says, "I have a really fast metabolism, that's why I can eat whatever I want", he's not hallucinating - he's full of shit.

Pffft - they didn't need to store the whole UUID, just a hash. Dummies.

I'll just point out that this is exactly the point in the corporate character arc where every company before turns evil.

I never liked the idea of every web site in the world using CloudFlare, but I like it even less now that they're struggling.

Y'all remember COVID?

Everything shut down for 6 months and somehow miraculously the economy just sort of chugged along without much shock until about 2 years later when all the consequences of the COVID aid/stimulus came home to roost.

That is exactly how this will play out.