Do you have evidence of leaders in the organization making hard choices to do the right thing?

This went from a hard yes to a soft no and I don’t know if it’s soul crushing but it feels super crappy.

I’ve been wondering the same, so hard. I feel like at this point I’d like to see a comparative study of the job of people that see it VS the job of people that don’t.

I remember some twenty years ago when I finished college I had this internship that turned into a summer job afterwards. Prestigious organization in fancy skyscraper. Our teachers were a bit nervous about it since it was the first time the got the org to accept interns and made it clear we should be extremely grateful and well behaved, or else.

Godfuck the job was boring. This massive tentacular place had a million subdivisions doing roughly the same thing in a different region but somehow each had enough torque to get to have their own little website with a different interface design and a handful of different fields. Our job was to rewrite backends from [boring old basic MS tech] to [shiny new overengineered MS tech]. Dozens and dozens of roughly alike but not entirely identical backends. After months of work there was still at least as much to do as had been done. The architects in place had no desire for harmonization or reuse. They knew be heart the features the seemed to rewrite periodically in a fancier ways.

Sometimes I wonder how many places feel like that, how many programmers embrace the repetitive churn, oblivious to the affront against the very core of software this represents. If these are the ones that see it.

Devaluing the human experience until the tech looks good

I’m far from having the final say on anything at my org. They’ve just decided not to embrace the slop. Sorry you’re in that kind of your company. Just be careful with skill atrophy.

I suggest you design the core bits of your project, actually fucking program it yourself, see what works and what doesn’t, review design, and repeat. (This is a programming community.)

yay <3

Maple Viburnum? I’m just googling wildly lol

Some kind of maple that is not a maple??

A pet project with a sufficient incentive (here, friends) is a perfect opportunity to pick up a new language too!

I would argue it’s better to have a good grasp on Javascript before tackling Typescript. The Typescript type system (the only reason to bother really) leaks Javascript quirks in different ways which aren’t going to make much sense without the underlying knowledge.

Garbage In Garbage Out

Fortunately software is much more than App ideas fishing for VC investments. A lot of us are building actual tools for nurses, teachers, technicians, artists, students, etc. We have to analyze these human beings’ role in society, their needs, their situation, which is different from merely preying on their attention span. Programming languages are still the most reliable way to specify how the software must behave. And once the software is done, it is merely born. It then lives through a steady flow of continuous adaptation until one day it dies as all things do. Downplaying the human condition is a mistake.

AI tools can generate functional, adequate, perfectly average code at a speed and cost that would have been unimaginable even five years ago. And like the outsourcing wave of the early 2000s, the economics are real and rational. Nobody is wrong for using these tools. The code they produce is often fine. It works. It passes tests. It might ship as-is.

Not the first time I’ve read this kind of statement and I always struggle to reconcile this with my personal experience. I’m seriously doubting that I’m just not a “good enough prompter”. I know how to explain context from domain to tech and vice versa, that’s like, a good 20% of my job. I’d say that AI tools are good at producing code that already exists.

The LLMs are an interface to a corpus of written material. They’ve never had a thought, a chat around the coffee machine, or any experience in the largest sense of the world. This is a hard barrier on any induction they may emulate.

But will the chat bot understand itself? It’s fun when you start questioning the LLM line by line about its own slop in the same session and it starts flagging all sorts of things it did wrong. Why didn’t it write it correctly in the first place? Or is the fix wrong? Who knows? People I guess. The model is fed on knowledge but whether it will activate in response to your prompt and be restored unadulterated is a coin toss.

It’s hard having two decades of experiences in a domain I suddenly find myself at odds with. Reading about others having the same qualm reassures me that I’m not going crazy. On the other I feel drawn further into an untenable contradictory position.

Once in a while I give in. It’s typically when I’m faced with a non trivial problem I realize will take me days of learning before I have any chance of tackling it. My colleagues start suggesting it or share some slop to “help out”. So I think fuck it I’ll study later for now AI will solve it I need this ticket closed asap. I fire up a “decent” paid model and I start feeding it context. Every time it’s a nightmare. Hours of trying stuff that doesn’t stick, of questioning, of arguing with a chat bot, of wading through “here are the facts” and “good catch” and “I owe you an apology”. It’s not a shortcut it’s a fucking dead end. Then the bitter aftertaste can only be cleansed with cold hard time consuming actual learning.

No matter how hard you pet your LLM, this project is not your work. LLM output attribution is a gray zone by design. Your assumption that vibe coding has overtaken software development is a big red flag imho. I wonder where you’ve acquired this belief. If you’ve been banned from multiple communities already I recommend you reflect upon this.

TLDR:

You should probably use a proper parser rather than hoping your .env looks enough like an .ini to pass muster.

You can probably use a butter knife instead of a flat screwdriver but just do your job properly.

Imagine the unfathomable power of a company who would harness the velocity of rapid AI advancement or somesuch AND keep their employees. The world isn’t ready for such raw productivity. It would be too easy to get ahead of competition. Understandably they steer clear of such lawless behaviour. Gentlemanly sportsmanship, truly.

Hey, good to know Apple’s music has been DRM free for a while! I’ve bounced off iTunes many, many years ago.

Look. We already have a little computer in our pocket. Besides Apple can go fly a kite with their DRM audio files. Just let me own my phone.

EDIT: iTunes used to sell DRM music a long time ago and then I stopped paying attention. They’re DRM free now, my bad.