Readit NewsPersonally I’m thrilled that I can get trivial, one-off programs developed for a few cents and the cost of a clear written description of the problem. Engaging internal developers or consulting developers to do anything at all is a horrible experience. I would waste weeks on politics, get no guarantees, and waste thousands of dollars and still hear nonsense like, “you want a form input added to a web page? Aw shucks, that’s going to take at least another month” or “we expect to spend a few days a month maintaining a completely static code base” from some clown billing me $200/hr.
My unsolicited advice is I would expect Owner-side administrators (IT people) to direct sales decisions, and they don’t care about users or working products. I have only ever met one CTO in the AEC space who even considered end user benefit. Unfortunately, this means your product quality and utility is not actually important as evidenced by the whole Bentley product line, but integration with existing products is. Nobody seems to make big money in tech for white-collar AEC unless Bentley or Autodesk buy your IP. Then they will crudely bolt it onto their garbage software and their missionaries embedded in large companies disguised as technologists and CAD managers will sell it.
My opinion is con-tech is totally broken for very complicated reasons with the private market (commercial architecture) being the only small voice of sanity since they compete on price sometimes.
Open it for all or nothing.
But this has been such a wake-up call. I stopped doing the extra work, no longer respond to questions that are out-of-hours, and have finally realized that the company really isn't my 'friend' or 'family'. But best of all, when I'm at the office I can just coast and do practically no work whatsoever - and not only does no-one notice, I've even been getting more managerial praise for my performance.
We're living in a mad world.
I see it as a pay cut where commute and prep hours are uncompensated, and I adjust my valuation of the job accordingly.
Microsoft has clearly taken notice. They're already starting to lock down the upstream VSCode codebase, as seen with recent changes to the C/C++ extension [0]. It's not hard to imagine that future features like TypeScript 7.0 might be limited or even withheld from forks entirely. At the same time, Microsoft will likely replicate Windsurf and Cursor's features within a year. And deliver them with far greater stability and polish.
Both Windsurf and Cursor are riddled with bugs that don't exist upstream, _especially_ in their AI assistant features beyond the VSCode core. Context management which is supposed to be the core featured added is itself incredibly poorly implemented [1].
Ultimately, the future isn't about a smarter editor, it's about a smarter teammate. Tools like GitHub Copilot or future agents will handle entire engineering tickets: generating PRs with tests, taking feedback, and iterating like a real collaborator.
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/24/microsoft_vs_code_sub...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/cursor/comments/1kbt790/rules_in_49...
Stable and polished are not words that ever came to my mind while using any Microsoft product.
OpenAI is probably already getting dark money for AI products of dubious worth.