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Seems it would at least be worth a try.

When I was in Mexico, a guy told me he had been somewhere in the backcountry alone and got stung by a scorpion. He spent several days in his tent in agonizing pain not if he may die or not. Quite an experience.

This reminds me a lot of the .COM startups in 2000 that were selling stuff to each other and once one failed, the whole chain would come down slowly. The scary part is the sheer amount of money that’s floating around now. In 2000 is was a few million here and there. Now it’s multiple billions.

They should just roll back the keyboard 5 to 10 years. Lately the keyboard is super temperamental. Sometimes it works pretty good and sometimes I have to retry multiple times until I get a simple sentence completed. It's really frustrating and it seems to be getting worse.

"Is it forcing us to "pay off" technical debt or is it starting us on a compulsory endless treadmill of feature-neutral fix-work? Collectively, we just won't know for a while."

Yes, let's fix the foundation. It will make adding features easier once the debt is paid off. And we will probably learn how to do better in the future. It reminds me of settings compiler warning to be treated as errors. Once you do that, you have a ton of work to do. But if you are smart (not all devs are), you learn why the warnings are there and avoid these problems in the future.

I think this is great. Reminds me of Y2K. I remember sometime around 1993 having a discussion with my boss why we store dates on our mainframe as YYMMDD instead of YYYYMMDD since we are approaching year 2000. He ignored the issue totally. I left the company but people told me later that in 1999 they suddenly started a huge effort to change the date format. Same with all the technical debt. It got ignored for a long time but finally we are forced to address it.

I think the story "Manna" describes pretty well what will happen if AI and robots do all/most work. People will basically be pushed into welfare buildings and receive minimum support to survive. I don't think the capitalists will share the wealth voluntarily. If they wanted, they could do that already, but they don't.

Like a lot of other activities that got automated and done cheaper and faster by machines you may have to do writing and coding as a hobby. It's sort of sad but that's how technological progress always has worked.

Craftsmen of all kind probably said the same thing when machines suddenly did their work cheaper and faster (and better?).

How many bananas is that?

"that the big wins come from specialists learning to code "

I used to work at startup that did video encoding. We had tons of computer vision scientists that refused to learn decent C++ coding practices. Their stuff never worked right and they didn't really contribute much. We also had a few scientists who were decent coders and pretty much all progress came from them.

I see the same with some data scientists. They want to do pure data science and refuse to do the coding to actually get their data. So they have to be spoon fed all the time and their progress is super slow.

That’s pretty expensive though.

It makes me admire people like Linus Thorvalds. His job is mostly to read code and stay on top of the contributions of many people. I don’t think I could do that.

Totally. Skip the PR and show it to a higher up manager.

I have tried an M4 Macbook a while ago but my M1 Max Macbook still feels plenty fast. Hope to keep that for a long time.

"my job is to put myself out of a job by teaching everyone to be an architect"

I used to do that but it's a dangerous game. If you don't make sure to still be very visible to management further up, you end up with a stalled career or being laid off.

Totally agree. AI amplifies what's there already

"don't even bother to check it."

I have to admit it gets really exhausting to review the AI output. It comes in so fast and more and more it's quite good. So it's very tempting to get more relaxed about reviews. I guess in a sense manual coding gave you some mental downtime while writing code. With AI you don't get that anymore. It's always full speed.

"The Chinese labs are not providing their open-weight models for free because they think it is good for humanity. "

Neither do Anthropic and OpenAI.

Young software devs don’t listen to their elders. They know better.

Purify was great until Rational bought it and jacked up the price 10x.

Didn't they also make sure Lotus 123 didn't run as well as it could have?

"New Mexico decided to go it alone and gets $25 billion."

I highly doubt that New Mexico will get 25. Although it would be nice since I live in New Mexico.

"Real" engineers aren't responsible for their product being used in nefarious ways as long as the product was built according to the rules.

I assume it's the typical "accepting responsibility" of execs and politicians where nothing happens. Best case they throw some underling under the bus or have their institution pay a fine. But they themselves have no consequences

Some people are wired for addiction and some aren't. I knew a guy who did heroin or cocaine a few times a year when he felt like it and never got addicted. I also quickly lose interest in alcohol or marijuana but I can't stop eating sweets no matter how hard I try...

That's a very good question. Let's set up a workgroup that meets once a week.

Your world will get smaller and smaller . I don’t think you can stop that wave.

It’s very disconcerting. I think this will largely be solved by going all in on AI and use it to test and review the code in an adversarial manner. That won’t be cheap but it’s the only way I see this work. But a lot of companies will probably save money and use AI mainly for writing code and then skimp on review and testing. I bet we will see some huge blow ups with AI written code and hopefully the industry will learn.

It also took the industry quite a while to accept that server code needs to be secure even if that requires a lot of extra effort. AI will probably be the same.

Using AI is really not different from hiring a bunch of people to do your project. You can tell them to do the minimum it takes to make it work or you can tell them or do it according to a long term vision you have and set high standards.

I agree that with AI it's very tempting to throw together a bunch of code without any thought of the longer term. But a lot of people are acting as if all programmers are artisans that produce well written code following the highest standards. That is just not true.

I am always amazed looking at tools like Norton Commander or Visicalc that invented a ton of concepts we now view as totally normal and just as the way things are. Same for a lot of programming concepts. The world could look totally different if some people had been better at selling their ideas.