A commit that was "co-authored-by" 6+ people and has three thousand lines of code: this is a total wreck of a development workflow. This feature should have been implemented with a series of about 20 patches. Awful.
Readit NewsMofpofjis commented on FFmpeg merges WebRTC support git.ffmpeg.org/gitweb/ffm... · Posted by u/Sean-Der
Mofpofjis commented on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts fly.io/blog/youre-all-nut... · Posted by u/tabletcorry
Mofpofjis commented on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts fly.io/blog/youre-all-nut... · Posted by u/tabletcorry
I can’t wait for the day when people no longer manually write text messages to each other, but instead just ask LLMs to read and respond from a few prompted words.
next level: use AI agents in their dating apps on both sides to decide if they want to hook up
Mofpofjis commented on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts fly.io/blog/youre-all-nut... · Posted by u/tabletcorry
> Professional software developers are in the business of solving practical problems for people with code. We are not, in our day jobs, artisans. Steve Jobs was wrong: we do not need to carve the unseen feet in the sculpture. Nobody cares if the logic board traces are pleasingly routed. If anything we build endures, it won’t be because the codebase was beautiful.
I think it comes all down to that, do you have pride in what you do or you don’t ?
I make a wall with bricks, even if it will be covered with coating i will do my best to have regular joints and pacing.
Could make it faster, no one would notice the difference but me… i hate that feeling when you done something and you know it’s barely enough, just barely, it’s kind of shit and you really don’t want others to see it.
On the opposite side, some people will take pride in building wall twice as fast as me and won’t care it’s horrendous.
Both cases are valid, but me i know i can’t do a work I’m not proud of.
> I make a wall with bricks, even if it will be covered with coating i will do my best to have regular joints and pacing.
Absolutely. This is at the core of it.
Mofpofjis commented on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts fly.io/blog/youre-all-nut... · Posted by u/tabletcorry
Why would anyone rather read and fix someone else code rather than writing the code themselves? I do a lot of code review for other human code and it use so much more energy than writing my own code (and surely, as I have competent colleagues, this is not even as bad as if I expected that the code that I'm reading could be totally random shit)
> Why would anyone rather read and fix someone else code rather than writing the code themselves?
Because their own review standards are low (so they find reviewing "easy"), and/or because they can't appreciate the emotional & mental fulfillment that coding provides.
Mofpofjis commented on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts fly.io/blog/youre-all-nut... · Posted by u/tabletcorry
Mofpofjis commented on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts fly.io/blog/youre-all-nut... · Posted by u/tabletcorry
I think the hardest part is not spending the next 3 months of my life in a cave finishing all the hobby/side projects I didn't quite get across the line.
It really does feel like I've gone from being 1 senior engineer to a team that has a 0.8 Sr. Eng, 5 Jrs. and one dude that spends all his time on digging through poorly documented open source projects and documenting them for the team.
Sure I can't spend quite as much time working on hard problems as I used to, but no one knows that I haven't talked to a PM in months, no one knows I haven't written a commit summary in months, it's just been my AI doppelgangers. Compared to myself a year ago I think I now PERSONALLY write 150% more HARD code than I did before. So maybe, my first statement about being 0.8 is false.
I think of it like electric bikes, there seems to be indication that people with electric assist bikes actually burn more calories/spend more time/go farther on an electric bike than those who have manual bikes https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22141....
For me, the electric bike analogy works differently: it enables people to ride, regularly, who would not be able to do that with traditional bikes. That's totally fine. But electric bikes don't threaten to take away our normal bikes.
Mofpofjis commented on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts fly.io/blog/youre-all-nut... · Posted by u/tabletcorry
I think where tptacek is right, though, is that if we're going to hold this position without hypocrisy, then we need to respect copyright as long as it exists. He's right that many of us have not done that; it's been very common to violate copyright for mere entertainment. If we want the licenses of our own work to be respected, then we need to extend that respect to others as well, regardless of the size of the copyright holder.
There are things that "modulate" this. Violating copyright is never right, of course, some questions are however scale, and purpose. Taking others' creative output, unlicensed, for large-scale commercial gain, is about the worst.
Mofpofjis commented on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts fly.io/blog/youre-all-nut... · Posted by u/tabletcorry
I still think smartphones are a huge negative to humanity. They improve a narrow case: having access to ephemeral knowledge. Nobody writes articles or does deep knowledge work with smartphones.
My position with the AI is almost the same. It is overall a net negative for cognitive abilities of people. Moreover I do think all AI companies need to pay fair licensing cost to all authors and train their models to accurately cite the sources. If they want more data for free, they need to propose copyright changes retroactively invalidating everything older than 50 years and also do the legwork for limiting software IP to 5 to 10 years.
Agreed. Smartphones are portable, mobile computers that suck at every single aspect of being, and working as, a computer, except for mobility. They are not powerful, they are not general purpose, they are not ergonimic, they do not respect user freedom or privacy. Use such a mobile device only when you can't avoid it (i.e., when you are on the road -- when mobility is the single most important priority), and at no other time.
Mofpofjis commented on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts fly.io/blog/youre-all-nut... · Posted by u/tabletcorry
"Kids today don’t just use agents; they use asynchronous agents. They wake up, free-associate 13 different things for their LLMs to work on, make coffee, fill out a TPS report, drive to the Mars Cheese Castle, and then check their notifications. They’ve got 13 PRs to review. Three get tossed and re-prompted. Five of them get the same feedback a junior dev gets. And five get merged."
I would jump off a bridge before I accepted that as my full-time job.
I've been programming for 20+ years and I've never wanted to move into management. I got into programming because I like programming, not because I like asking others to write code on my behalf and review what they come up with. I've been in a lead role, and I certainly do lots of code review and enjoy helping teammates grow. But the last fucking thing I want to do is delegate all the code writing to someone or something else.
I like writing code. Yes, sometimes writing code is tedious, or frustrating. Sometimes it's yak-shaving. Sometimes it's Googling. Very often, it's debugging. I'm happy to have AI help me with some of that drudgery, but if I ever get to the point that I feel like I spend my entire day in virtual meetings with AI agents, then I'm changing careers.
I get up in the morning to make things, not to watch others make things.
Maybe the kind of software engineering role I love is going to disappear, like stevedores and lamplighters. I will miss it dearly, but at least I guess I got a couple of good decades out of it. If this is what the job turns into, I'll have to find something else to do with my remaining years.
> I got into programming because I like programming, not because I like asking others to write code on my behalf and review what they come up with
oh finally someone else who didn't enter programming because, as 7-10 year old child, they were into SOLVING PRACTICAL PROBLEMS FOR PEOPLE.
> But the last fucking thing I want to do is delegate all the code writing to someone or something else
Thank God there is at least one other person that understands that the ratio between creative and reactive work is crucial for wellbeing at the job.
For crying out loud.
> but if I ever get to the point that I feel like I spend my entire day in virtual meetings with AI agents, then I'm changing careers
so am I.
> but at least I guess I got a couple of good decades out of it
Thanks for this perspective. Yes, at least we've got our memories, and the code locations and commits we recall from memory, from a distance of 10 or more years.
>. If this is what the job turns into, I'll have to find something else to do with my remaining years
Me too.