sdevonoes

This is not capitalism, it’s tech feudalism

It’s a shame I cannot inspect the tool. It’s a shame I cannot modify it as I see fit. It’s a shame that I need to pay $200/month to use it. But hey, I am a 3X engineer and my boss likes it, so I guess it should be fine? Not really, but I still get to pay the bills (for now)

I miss the tools I used in the past (gcc, linux, sqlite,…)

On AI and communication with others: before AI when joining a company, the first weeks was all about talking to team mates asking about the systems we own as a team, how things work, how to do X, how to get unstuck…

Nowadays you ask all of that to codex/claude. And it works. It’s a regression. I don’t mind spending 2h helping a colleague debugging an issue. It’s fun, it creates bonds and we both benefit from it (ofc my employer would think it’s a waste of time, but I couldn’t care less about what executive millionaires think)

That it will make a few individuals even more ultra mega rich. And then they will have even more power to adjust the world as they see fit.

> Today, software can be created more or less instantly with AI, for a large user base or for yourself, for any purpose or for no serious purpose at all.

I don’t think this is true. I’m working on medium to large features in companies that have around 1K engineers. These features typically involve 50% of work within your domain plus 50% of work in dependant domains. You cannot get anything doing without previous alignment with such domains. There are discussions, tradeoffs, design docs, approval committees, etc. AI can (and does) help in every step, but it’s not a magic wand that can solve the whole thing with a well crafted prompt. Ithe hands of inexperienced people, AI slows down things (e.g., ai-generated robotic and lengthy slack messages that go nowhere, PRs that implement what a jira ticket says… but jira tickets without alignment are worthless, etc)

You never need to print sensitive stuff like ids/passports/medical-reports? I wouldn’t print that in public places

> in winter we would wake up in pitch black darkness, commute in the dark, and the sun would finally rise while we were at school. It sucked.

But you had that extra daylight time in the afternoon (which in London wouldn’t be the case). Wasnt that better? Just curious. For me it would be

Just curious. Do you prefer then daylight during early morning rather then in the afternoon?

It’s interesting for me because early morning means for me: dealing with duties (prepare for school, commute to work, etc) so I don’t really mind doing that in the dark. But afternoon time means for me: free time (school/work is finished ) So if there’s daylight I can decide to go to the park, or play outside, or go to a terrace to eat something. Doing that in the dark is just not feasible

Can the CEO tell claude to build the app? No. Then engineers are needed

No human reads those md anymore

But the people who will be replaced won’t have money to pay the people with wrenches. We all are gonna get poorer

Agree on all except for this part

> The machines will do the knowing and caring for them

I don’t think it’s “the machines”, it’s the big 2-3 corporations the ones doing the thinking for us (aka controlling). These AI agents are whatever these corporations want them to be and will configure them as they see fit. We are outsourcing intelligence to a few companies.

Next year you may be unemployed (because your boss will cut by half the engineering department), or perhaps your salary will be cut by half (because your boss will route your other half of your salary to openai/anthropic), or perhaps you will get half insane (because your boss will ask you 10X the output you used to have but within the same timeframe)

Whatever the path is, regular engineers (90% of the people around here) will get screwed up one way or another. But hey, playing with LLM agents is cool!

It makes sense because those who can are multibillion dollar companies/people. You and me are just peasants. That’s why we should avoid using proprietary agents, just so the rich ones don’t get any richer

Problem is where to stop. Open a 3rd session? Are you sure the 4th iteration is mostly correct? Let’s try a fifth now…

I wish I could care more about what the computer wants (because it’s fun). I couldn’t care less what the product demands.

> Business people can just directly convey what they want to the AI. Today, yes, this often leads to a mess. But for how long?

As long as “business” people don’t wanna do the job and prefer to pay for it. It’s like, you can fix your own sink pipes if you follow youtube video tutorials long enough… it’s just usually not worth the effort, and so you pay someone to do it.

Business people, I imagine, don’t want to deal with software at all.

But isn’t “grooming” the hardest part? To know the details means to know the codebases behind. So you do discovery, read code, ask people, check db tables, and then once you figure it out, you write a doc with the proposed solution. It gets reviewed and then you code it.

I definitely need AI help for the discovery part… so it always starts with a simple “I need to do X”

I would replace the eng. managers

> “the AI did it" to be any acceptable excuse.

It will be depending on how much you paid. My bet is that in the near future normal people (like most of us) will be attended by AI in pretty much everywhere: the bank, the hospital, shops, hotels, etc.

You will need to pay extra premium to be attended by a human being. Actually that’s what’s been happening to the ultra rich since a very long time ago (e.g. a millionaire doesn’t book an appointment by using their phones, they ask their assistant to book for them; they don’t go online shopping, they get people do the shopping for them, etc)

Never understood the “skills” part tbh. Thse models are being trained in trillions of texts. Adding something small and particular about my codebase doesn’t really move the needle

AI as technology is cool and all, as cool as GCC or Linux or HTTP. The thing I don’t like about AI is that 99% of the time we talk about vendor-locked AI (claude, codex) and 99% of the time we use those. So you need to pay to use the models. You depend on the big corporations. It’s not anymore, I clone this repo and let’s explore freely.

Nah, LLM models are already the new compilers. A commodity only engineers know how to use (in the context of software engineering in production environments)

I think things would take longer to get done (and that’s fine for me tbh).

The main usage of AI for me is to do discovery: if I am working on service A that has a dozen other services as dependencies, then I clone all the repos, point the agent at them, and start to ask questions. I double check ofc. But without the agent I would be back to manual grep code and git logs, asking around, etc… that takes longer and you may miss things

Tip: include pictures of your machine. Not sure if I’m alone in this, but I love to see other people’s setups

Same interview process. Recruiter call, Live coding, System design, Behaviour interview.

The only difference is that in the Live coding session they now allow AI to be used. I didn’t use it and went old way (because I had already rehearsed it the old way, and found no feedback on the internet about how the company assess AI usage, so I didn’t want to be the Guinea pig)

Interview took place this summer. Major tech company in EU (not faang tho). Also Live coding is not leetcode.

I love to write code and solve problems in personal projects. I love to read interesting technical books. I love to learn certain new technologies.

I hate doing the same at work. I couldn’t care less about my CEO’s product, nor about our linting tips or dependency management rules. My PO can pretend he’s the owner of the company, my engineer colleagues that we are shipping the next google. I couldn’t care less. I do it because I get paid and because it’s my career.

So, it’s not like “you like coding or not”. It has nuances

If someone comes with a pretty decent idea and execution, it doesn’t really matter if code was written by human or llm, does it? Like if the next torvalds ships something great in the open, who cares how was it written.

I would love to buy the machine but I hate Tahoe.

So many things he got right (except you know what)